GameNative (Plus)

A personal fork of GameNative with native RetroArch shader support (librashader) — every game frame runs through a filter chain before it hits the screen, and each game remembers its own shader.

⚠️ Bleeding edge — use at your own risk

This fork is a personal hobby project, largely built with AI-assisted ("vibe") coding to scratch specific needs that I decided to share with the community. It is not affiliated with the original GameNative developers or the Winlator project. Expect rough edges, experimental changes and no guarantees — you use this at your own risk. Don't expect support from upstream channels; report issues on this repository instead.

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Before / After

Real captures from the fork's shader pipeline on an Adreno 650 device (Xiaomi Mi 11). The same game, same frame, with and without a RetroArch shader preset applied — no restart needed to switch.

Hollow Knight: Silksong

Without shader	With shader

Moonlighter

Without shader	With shader

Gravity Circuit

Without shader	With shader

Shader menu (in-game QuickMenu)

Live from the in-game effects panel: toggle RetroArch shaders on/off, pick any preset from the 2,541-preset catalog, or filter by the ReShade folder presets.

Toggle	Presets	ReShade presets

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What this fork adds: RetroArch shader support (librashader)

This fork brings native RetroArch shader support to GameNative's Vulkan renderer: every game frame is pushed through a librashader filter chain before it hits the screen, so you can apply the same CRT, LCD, scanline, upscaling and color-grading effects you know from RetroArch to your PC games — switched live from the in-game effects panel, with no restart required.

What's included:

• librashader Vulkan runtime (built from source in the Gradle build — no prebuilts)
• The full libretro/slang-shaders catalog, downloaded shader-by-shader on demand — 2,541 presets across 35 families (CRT, LCD, cel, HDR, NTSC, color grading…). The APK ships no shader files, only a metadata manifest (catalog.json), so the whole catalog is browsable instantly and offline. Nothing is downloaded by default: picking a preset downloads only that shader's files (typically a few KB) from the pinned upstream commit, caches them for reuse, and applies the shader automatically
• Per-game shader memory — each game remembers its own shader preset (stored per container), so you can keep a CRT look on one game and an LCD/upscaling look on another; switching games never disturbs the other's selection
• Live preset switching (in-game effects panel or per-container config), verified on Adreno 650 with an automated black-box test loop
• A hardened pipeline: chain access from the render thread only, failure fallback (a broken preset degrades to the unshaded frame instead of a black screen), create-first preset swap and bounded fence waits

How it was built — credit where credit is due

Shipping this feature meant studying how established emulators integrate librashader in Vulkan. An automated agent reviewed the production implementations of two reference projects and ported their battle-tested patterns into GameNative's compositor:

• melonDS — the DS/DSi emulator by StapleButter and contributors — together with the melonDS Android port by Rafael Caetano (v0.7.0.rc2), contributed the offscreen → sampler → swapchain present topology, the image-layout tracking and the wide memory barriers that keep the Adreno driver honest.
• ARMSX2 — the native-ARM64 fork of PCSX2 — contributed the render-thread parameter application pattern, the chain failure fallback + latch, and the create-first swap that keeps the previous shader alive when a new preset fails to build.

To the melonDS developers, Rafael Caetano, the PCSX2 team, the ARMSX2 team, SnowflakePowered for librashader, and the libretro community for the shader pack — thank you. This feature would not exist without your work.

What you get

• Play games you actually own on Steam, Epic, GOG and Amazon
• Cloud saves that carry over between your PC and your phone
• Controller and touch support, with a custom control editor and on-screen HUD
• Steam DLC, workshop and branch support
• RetroArch shaders (see above) — the whole 2,541-preset catalog, per-game memory, live switching

Building

GameNative (Plus) publishes ready-to-install APKs on the Releases page — grab the latest app-modern-release.apk and install it directly on your device. Prefer building from source? It's a Winlator/GameNative-derived Android project with a Rust toolchain in the loop for librashader.

1. Prerequisites:
   • Android SDK (point local.properties at it: sdk.dir=/path/to/Android/Sdk)
   • JDK 17+ (in this repo's CI/dev setup: JAVA_HOME=<android-studio>/jbr)
   • Rust/cargo (~/.cargo/bin) — librashader is compiled from source for 3 ABIs
   • NDK 27.3.13750724
   • Git submodules: git submodule update --init (pulls app/src/main/cpp/extras/adrenotools and app/src/main/cpp/lsfg-vk-android)
2. Build: JAVA_HOME=<android-studio>/jbr ./gradlew assembleModernDebug (flavors: modern / legacy)
3. Install the APK on your Android device, log in to your Steam account, install your game and hit play.

License

GPL 3.0 — same as upstream. See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES for attributions, copyleft source offers, and notices about third-party and proprietary components bundled with the app.

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Disclaimer: This software is meant for playing games that you legally own. Don't use it for piracy or anything else illegal. The maintainer takes no responsibility for misuse.