ARMSX3 1.6

XMB Mode

A second home screen and in-game menu in the style of the PS3's XMB. Turn it on with XMB Mode in the side menu, under Boot XMB. ARMSX3 remembers it, and Users > Exit XMB Mode takes you back to the library. XMB Mode takes its words (in ARMSX3's language), icons, fonts, startup sound and the settings behind its wave from your installed PS3 firmware (more on that below).

• The console's startup, with ARMSX3's lettering, then the wave fading up in the month's colour. Leaving XMB Mode plays a console-style shutdown, then ARMSX3's own startup.

• The console's wave, drawn the way the firmware draws it, in each month's colour. Late at night it dims as the console's does. Theme Settings can pick a colour, cycle through the months, or show the simple wave or a screensaver behind the menu instead. By default, the background will change color and brightness depending on the month and time of day.

• PS3 themes (.p3t) bring their background (still, slideshow or animated), their XMB icons and their system sounds. Themes added before 1.6 pick up their icons and sounds by themselves when their .p3t is still in Download or Documents (with all-files access); otherwise, re-add the theme again for icon and sound support.

• Your games with their own media: PIC1 backgrounds, SND0 music and animated ICON1 icons, for PKG, folder, ISO and CHD games. A game with no SND0 plays its ICON1 music.

• Every ARMSX3 setting as XMB lists, with search in every tab, "Not default" tags, and the remembered per-game settings with a way to forget them. The core settings sit at the top of Settings.

• The whole app in the XMB: PKG/Data Manager with game updates and DLC, save states with their pictures, mods, trophies, patches and cheats, skins, controller mapping and hotkeys, firmware install, app updates and What's New with pictures.

• A Triangle menu on every game: play, its own settings, clearing its PPU and SPU caches, and adding it to the home screen. m3u playlists have their own folders.

• Photo and Music columns: your screenshots and photo slideshows, a music player with playlists, and ARMSX3's music settings.

A console-style "Welcome Back!"** when you wake your device with the app open, in the top right with your RPCN avatar.

• Friends and Network: RPCN friends, requests and invites, Discord friends with the game they are playing, and Remote Play. Your RPCN and Discord pictures, the clock and the battery sit in the top bar.

• The in-game XMB is the pause menu: Resume, Restart, Change Disc, Portal, Close Game, then the on-screen, graphics, performance and controls settings, screenshots, music, friends and invites, with save and load states at the bottom. Switching renderer or driver offers Apply and Restart.

• Fully touch supported UI as well as controller: tap to focus and open, long-press for an item's options, tap outside a list to back out.

Games

• Resistance: Fall of Man and NHL Legacy keep running on Vulkan. Resistance could crash while loading a new chapter, and NHL Legacy during play. Done by @kd-11.
• Games boot faster. Cached PPU code loads on several threads, each cache file is read once, and a damaged one is compiled again. Done by @Megamouse.

Graphics

• Shader Resolution (new, under Shader Preset): runs a RetroArch shader preset at a lower resolution, then scales its picture up to the screen. Heavy presets like koko-aio run far faster. It is 67% by default, and 100% keeps the full size. It works while a game is running, in Settings and in the in-game menu.

• A shader preset that fails to load no longer keeps the others from loading.

Saves and trophies

• Saving works on storage that refuses to rename files, such as some SD cards and custom data folders. Saving there could stop the game with "Game stopped"; ARMSX3 now copies the old save aside instead. Trophy data installs the same way.

Performance and fixes

• Ending an SPU thread group no longer keeps a CPU core busy. Done by @elad335.
• Large game patches apply faster, with their helpers cached once for every game. Done by @Whatcookie.
• The ARM SPU dispatcher is simpler. Done by @Whatcookie.
• SPU code compiles with less work, skipping what only logging used. Done by @Megamouse.
• Raw SPU programs free their memory when loading fails, and HLE memory allocation marks the thread as waiting. Done by @digant73.
• Video recording waits on notifications instead of timed sleeps. Done by @Megamouse.
• The USIO arcade card reader is reworked around a generic NFC reader and resends correctly after a NACK. Done by @Megamouse and @brian218.

How XMB Mode works

To install the PS3 firmware, you give ARMSX3 the official PS3 system software update (PS3UPDAT.PUP), which Sony offers as a free download. The installer, which ARMSX3 has from RPCS3, decrypts that update and unpacks the console's internal flash (dev_flash) into ARMSX3's data folder. This is how RPCS3 works on every platform: games call into the PS3's system software, so it has to be installed for them to run.

Boot XMB runs the PS3's own system software from that folder. It is Sony's XMB code running on the emulated console, the same way it runs on a real PS3.

XMB Mode runs none of Sony's code. It is ARMSX3's own interface, written for Android and drawn natively, and it reads a few files the firmware install has already unpacked:

• the XMB's words in every language, and its icons
• the system fonts
• the startup sound
• the settings and lookup texture behind the wave, which ARMSX3 draws with its own shader and simulation

Those files are stored unencrypted in dev_flash once the firmware is installed, so XMB Mode decrypts nothing. PS3 themes work the same way: their icons and sounds come from the .p3t file you import. None of these files ship with ARMSX3, they stay on your device, in your own user supplied firmware install. ARMSX3 is unaffiliated with Sony Interactive Entertainment.