DroidDeck-Proton/README.md

DroidDeck-Proton

A GE-Proton based Proton build for ARM64 (aarch64) Linux, made for DroidDeck: Valve's Steam client in an Arch Linux ARM rootfs, running Windows games through ARM64 Proton with FEX.

Important

DroidDeck-Proton is an unofficial build. It is not GE-Proton, Proton-CachyOS or Valve's Proton and is not affiliated with GloriousEggroll, CachyOS or Valve. Please report problems here, not to those projects.

Install

1. Download DroidDeck-Proton-<version>-aarch64.tar.gz from Releases.
2. Extract it into Steam's compatibilitytools.d folder.
3. Restart Steam and pick DroidDeck-Proton <version> as the game's compatibility tool.

What's inside

DroidDeck-Proton is GE-Proton (DXVK, vkd3d-proton, FEX, protonfixes, media stack and the proton script, unchanged) with Wine built in seven tiers. Each tier is a tag on the Wine branch, so any one of them can be bisected or turned off on its own.

Tier	Contents	Tag
1	Valve Proton Wine, bleeding-edge	bp-11.12-tier1
2	Everything GE-Proton11-12 applies to Wine	bp-11.12-tier2
3	CachyOS game fixes GE doesn't already carry	bp-11.12-tier3
4	Our portable fixes from the Bannerlator layers	bp-11.12-tier4
5	DroidDeck esync, built in	bp-11.12-tier5
6	SD card fixes (games on noexec storage, drive-root copies)	bp-11.12-tier6
7	.NET mod loaders on ARM64 (upstream Wine fix, since 11-11.2)	bp-11.12-tier7

Up to 11-10.1 tier 7 was the DirectShow FMV row order fix. GE-Proton11-11 carries the same fix (ge-video-rework/0096), so it is part of tier 2 now, and tier 7 is a new fix since 11-11.2.

Wine source: The412Banner/proton-wine, branch banner-proton/11.12 (the wine submodule). Versions and pins: banner-proton/VERSION and banner-proton/PINS.

Formerly Banner-Proton; releases up to 11-7.2 used the old name.

Pins (11-12.3)

Component	Commit
GE-Proton (proton-ge-custom tag GE-Proton11-12)	f85547f0ea51ac356ab42b4de57b927b0044cc85
DXVK (same as GE: v3.1.1-174)	f863776806824486d709fee16ea619c03e22def4
Valve Wine bleeding-edge (same as GE, 2026-10-31 + later commits)	fda79a585939fb7512dc220a11249f9ffe825fcf
FEX (same as GE: FEX-2610-116, plus patches/fex)	02e24ca5c01ed0c864466ed573db347336f70170
CachyOS Wine cachyos_11.0_20261014/main (release cachyos-11.0-20261015-slr)	cd14106e4fc0f96006005b07985e49cc1517e9c0
CachyOS Wine cachyos_11.0_20261014/dev (unreleased; two HID commits in tier 3)	c3808057d6
DroidDeck-Proton Wine banner-proton/11.12 (+ the winex11 offscreen-check cache)	303894db765bad9936de9a532cb833dada939d58

vkd3d-proton (v3.1), vkd3d, d7vk, dxvk-nvapi (v0.9.3), dxvk-igdext, lsteamclient, wineopenxr and protonfixes are GE-Proton11-12's pins.

11-12.1 moves to GE-Proton11-12 and carries every fix of 11-11.11 below: tiers 3–7 and the offscreen-check cache are cherry-picked onto banner-proton/11.12 unchanged except the esync tier (ported, see tier 5), and the deferred Wine and FEX patches apply at build time as before. The 32-bit lost wake fix (11-11.5) is rebased onto GE's newer stale-alert fix. The three GE master fixes 11-11.1 took early are GE's own now. New in 11-12.1 besides GE-Proton11-12: two CachyOS HID fixes (tier 3) and K11MCH1's FEX load fixes (patches/fex/0013 and the rpmalloc patch, PR #9: translated code kept on empty reads, one 128 MB code buffer, fewer waits on Wine's memory lock).

11-12.3 is 11-12.2 plus winex11 text-field reporting (patches/wine-hotfixes/pending/winex11-report-ime-context-focus.patch): winex11 implements EnableIMEContext, so when the focused window gains or loses an input context (a game's chat or search box), it writes agent/wine-ime.json for DroidDeck, which opens its chat input for that box.

11-12.2 is 11-12.1 plus the ARM64X import thunk fix (patches/wine-hotfixes/pending/winebuild-arm64x-import-thunk-hotpatch.patch): winebuild writes Microsoft's hotpatchable thunk shape into ARM64X DLLs and keeps the last thunk of a section inside it after strip, and ntdll's ARM64EC call check follows that shape, so x86-64 hooks on system DLL exports land and ARM64EC callers still skip the emulator.

History on GE-Proton11-11: 11-11.2 is 11-11.1 plus tier 7. 11-11.3 is 11-11.2 plus the WoW ARM64EC game patch. 11-11.4 is 11-11.3 plus Android shared-storage file ownership. 11-11.5 is 11-11.4 plus the 32-bit lost wake fix (Battle.net freezes). 11-11.6 is 11-11.5 plus the winex11 offscreen-check cache for DroidDeck's Performance mode: off unless WINE_OFFSCREEN_CHECK_MS is set (DroidDeck sets 100 only with Performance mode on), so the present path does not ask wineserver for the window's relatives twice a frame. 11-11.7 is 11-11.6 plus Wine's own DLLs no longer reported read-only (MapleStory copies ws2_32.dll and crashed). 11-11.8 is 11-11.7 plus Android's shared storage treated as case-insensitive, so creating files in a large folder there no longer lists the whole folder each time (Battle.net installs into a Games folder slowed to about 100 KB/s). 11-11.9 is 11-11.8 plus Dmage22's FEX-D2 fixes for Blizzard's protected loaders in the bundled FEX (patches/fex, applied on top of the FEX pin at every build). StarCraft Remastered's 32-bit client no longer faults in ClientSdk.dll when it starts. 11-11.10 is 11-11.9 plus a ws2_32 game patch for DiRT 3 and DiRT Showdown: with their motion telemetry on, a sendto() on the socket they closed at the end of a race (or when leaving Joyride) reports 0 bytes sent instead of failing with error 10038, which stopped the game. 11-11.11 is 11-11.10 plus 32-bit executables loaded at their preferred base again. Only 64-bit .exe files are relocated to the top of the address space now, so older 32-bit games and their loaders find themselves at the address they were built for, as on Valve's Proton. A loader that starts a 32-bit game suspended can read and patch it at 0x400000 again.

Tier 2 – GE-Proton

All of GE-Proton's Wine patching at GE-Proton11-12 (f85547f0), applied by GE's own protonprep Wine section on tier 1, one commit per section: configure revert, EM-11 wine-wayland + wineopenxr + EM fixups, wine-staging (with GE's exclusions and rebased sets), game patches, hotfixes, pending upstream patches and GE's custom patches (FSR, Reflex, OptiScaler, video rework, DS5 haptics, Bluetooth LE, …). Everything applied cleanly. The Verify wine tier 2 workflow re-runs GE's section on tier 1 and checks the result matches tier 2 plus its follow-ups.

New in GE-Proton11-12:

• Valve Wine bleeding-edge 2026-10-31 and later: XInput rescans controllers only when a device could have changed (replaces the Far Cry 4 and Witcher 3 hacks), thread pool worker timeout 60 s, Voice Capture DSP (mfwmaaec) audio capture, HID input reports cut to their declared length
• controllers: DualSense haptics and adaptive triggers together over USB in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and the Horizon games (GE #860), Armored Core VI through the Steam Input fallback, PROTON_STEAM_INPUT_XBOX_PROMPTS (GE #841), Where Winds Meet touchpad (GE #829)
• windowing: Hyprland fullscreen regression (GE #871), Fcitx5 IME freeze on Wine-Wayland (GE #798), a present/focus deadlock (GE #908), animated cursors (GE #919), X11 pointer-grab hang (GE #920, Syrupdesu), Cinnamon title bars (GE #767), DayZ device creation on Wayland with an OpenXR runtime installed (GE #852)
• video: MSFS 2024 intro speed (GE #389), AAC intros stopping (GE #882), The Godfather FMV flicker (GE #909, AITUS95), arcade and Konami movie fixes (aderumier), khdays-port cutscene deadlock (GE #899), VRChat RTSP streams (l12436)
• ntsync: a mutex a process closed while one of its threads still waited on it is abandoned when that thread dies (Jason Eggleston, WineHQ 60524)
• the three GE master fixes 11-11.1 took early are part of it: the Space Marine 2 stale-alert fix (now with its test, GE 960acd0a), winewayland OpenVR/OpenXR device extensions (GE #852), lsteamclient's Sony fallback

Earlier, in GE-Proton11-11 (hotfix): games no longer freeze when a video is skipped while MPEG-1 audio plays (GE #865), MPEG-1 video through AMStream no longer upside down (GE #863), no heap corruption from scaled video frames (GE #864, aderumier), vkd3d-proton no longer trips Easy Anti-Cheat in Star Citizen and Hunt: Showdown (GE #858), Star Citizen AMD AGS override removed, protonfixes update (Star Citizen .NET 4.8, mod loaders, Windows version re-applied after winetricks).

Earlier, in GE-Proton11-10: Valve Wine bleeding-edge 2026-10-16 (upstream syscall emulation for EAC/EOS launchers, x86_64 only), ACE anti-cheat driver fixes (ntoskrnl, lsass SamSs stub; Arknights: Endfield), Star Citizen's bundled AMD AGS, faster shared SRW lock releases, llvm-libc fixes, the PlayStation controller XInput fallback no longer rescanning HID devices on every poll, Bluetooth DS4/DualSense rumble through the fallback, KWin per-monitor HDR state and owned-popup destruction fixes (em-fixups/0071, 0072), MonoGame song replay fix (ge-video-rework/0093, 0094).

GE's non-Wine changes arrive through the merge of GE-Proton11-12: DXVK v3.1.1-174 (command submission throttling and memory eviction rework, present timing fixes), the D7VK DirectDraw/D3D7 rework, VKD3D-Proton 3.1, DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.3, FEX-2610-116, and the proton script's controller defaults.

Tier 3 – CachyOS

Cherry-picked (-x) from CachyOS Wine, all still in CachyOS cd14106e (release cachyos-11.0-20261015-slr), carried unchanged from 11-11.11, plus two from CachyOS's unreleased cachyos_11.0_20261014/dev (c3808057d6):

• ntdll: WINE_DISABLE_SFN option (Yakuza 5 cutscenes) – Pedro Nishiyama
• win32u: opaque webviews for Wuthering Waves – NelloKudo
• pdh: no access violation in PdhCloseQuery on a bad handle; powrprof: stub PowerReadACValueIndex – Ziia Shi
• ntdll: SystemPowerInformation semi-stub, RtlAreLongPathsEnabled – Etaash Mathamsetty
• mountmgr.sys: StorageDeviceTrimProperty stub – Jactry Zeng
• d3d8: valid box in vertex/index buffer Lock – Stefan Dösinger
• ddraw: enumerate the ramp device; pass the active device to material_activate – Elizabeth Figura, Rémi Bernon
• wined3d: pixel-format fixes – Elizabeth Figura, Zhiyi Zhang, Patrick Zacharias
• xaudio2_7: Darksiders Warmastered crash workaround – NelloKudo
• mfplat: R8_UINT in MFCreateDXGISurfaceBuffer – Nikolay Sivov
• setupapi: initialize the Service value size when checking for winehid devices – M0n7y5 (new in 20261014)
• crypt32: keep the order of authenticated attributes when verifying signatures, with tests (WineHQ MR 11824: FL Studio, Genshin Impact / Zenless Zone Zero CN editions) – Michael Nelson (new in 20261015)
• winebus.sys: an error for IOCTL_HID_GET_STRING when a device has no serial number; hidclass.sys: multi-TLC child devices named after the FDO instance id, not the serial number – Ivo Ivanov (from the dev branch, new in 11-12)

Not picked: the dev branch's setupapi "fail SetupDiGetDeviceInterfaceAlias instead of aborting" (GE carries the same author's full implementation, proton-ds5-haptic/0102, Fabian Wosar); its winepipewire/mmdevapi hotplug and USB instance-id series and coreaudio (CachyOS's audio stack); anything GE or Valve Wine already carries (CachyOS 20261014's crypt32 certificate-chain and schannel fixes, the ACE anti-cheat fixes); win32u "don't decorate maximized windows" (same line as GE's frameless-window change), and CachyOS 20261015's revert of it; CachyOS 20261015's winewayland owned-popup reparenting (written against CachyOS's wine-wayland, conflicts with GE's EM-11 tree); x86_64-only code (EAC/EOS syscall forwarding); changes that conflict with GE's winedmo video rework; branding/policy defaults (fsync on, Windows 11, version string, font smoothing); larger features left for later (winepipewire, futex tuning, FSR4/MLFG, kernel-object series, LTO/clang).

Tier 4 – Our fixes (Bannerlator layer v14)

• WINE_FORCE_SSBS switch on top of Wine MR 12262 (=0 restores the old behaviour)
• WINEVMEMMAXSIZE (MB): cap a single NtAllocateVirtualMemory (inert when unset)
• ntdll: bounds-check RtlIsEcCode (Denuvo unwinding loop, Need for Speed Heat)
• mf/topology_loader: restore the upstream type when optional insertion fails – NelloKudo
• sharedgpures.sys: earlier shared-resource protocol (D3D9→D3D11 video on DXVK < 3.0)
• rsaenh: hold the public key during CPVerifySignature
• gdiplus: clamp degenerate spans instead of asserting (EA app installer)
• xinput: survive a transient WAIT_FAILED in the update thread
• win32u: MAX_FONT_HANDLES 5000 → 32768
• GE game fix dai_xinput (Dragon Age: Inquisition controller, SteamGameId 1222690 only)

Not carried: winegstreamer and media fixes that GE's winedmo rework replaces or already covers, fixes Valve Wine already has, and everything Android/bionic-specific.

Tier 5 – DroidDeck esync

droiddeck-esync/patches/valve-11/0001-droiddeck-esync.patch from Droid-Deck/DroidDeck-Components 780ab619de (maxjivi05). On banner-proton/11.12 it is ported to GE-Proton11-12's in-process mutex change (Jason Eggleston, GE 6161ec53): the client cache entry keeps both GE's serial and esync's shared-memory index, and the server destroys an esync object before GE's ntsync orphan check. Adds eventfd/shared-memory sync to wineserver and ntdll (Elizabeth Figura's esync design), so no separate esync pack is needed. Sync order stays ntsync → fsync → esync (WINEESYNC) → server; the log says droiddeck-esync: up and running. when esync is used. No wineserver request or ntdll.so export changes (CI checks both).

Tier 6 – SD card fixes (Arihany)

From our Wine 11 port (proton-wine proton_11.0, 497c384f), offsets only:

• ntdll – PE images in anonymous memory (virtual.c; originally GameNative's). Private image mappings are read into anonymous memory instead of mmaped, so games on a noexec mount (an Android SD card) start instead of failing with "noexec filesystem?".
• shell32 – drive-root copies (shlfileop.c). A bare root like D:\ keeps its backslash, so SHFileOperation copies between drive roots no longer crash.

Not taken: the LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 default (bionic-only; DroidDeck uses glibc).

Game patch – WoW Forever ARM64EC

Deferred build-time patch for WowB-ARM64.exe (ARM64EC) on aarch64 — not committed in the wine submodule:

patches/game-patches/wow-forever-arm64ec-ntdll.patch

Applied after banner-proton/prep.sh by banner-proton/apply-deferred-game-patches.sh (.github/workflows/_group.yml). Omitted from patches/protonprep-valve-staging.sh until the same change is tagged on The412Banner/proton-wine.

Area	What it fixes
signal_arm64.c	Zero CONTEXT before save_context (stale debug regs → intermittent Game Initialization Failed: I)
asm.h	TEB → KSDT syscall stubs; ARM64EC fallback to __wine_syscall_dispatcher when TEB slots are empty
syscall.c / thread.c	Publish dispatcher in KSDT; ntdll_arm64ec_sync_syscall_dispatch() on EC thread start / after ChpeV2
env.c	NLS section map fallback when section maps fail
virtual.c	Map-time init of __wine_syscall_dispatcher for manually mapped ntdll SEC_IMAGE views

Game patch – DiRT 3 / DiRT Showdown telemetry (error 10038)

Deferred build-time patch, applied by banner-proton/apply-deferred-game-patches.sh like the WoW one:

patches/game-patches/dirt-telemetry-sendto-closed-socket.patch

DiRT 3 (dirt3_game.exe) and DiRT Showdown (showdown.exe, showdown_avx.exe) keep sending motion telemetry on the UDP socket they closed at the end of a race and when leaving Joyride. sendto() fails with WSAENOTSOCK and the game stops with "sendto failed with error 10038"; Windows does the same. For these three executables only, sendto() in dlls/ws2_32/socket.c reports 0 bytes sent for that failure (the executable name is checked once per process). Every other game and every other sendto() result are unchanged. Same behaviour as DiRTTelemetryErrorFix by RoccoC, based on Carsten Gottschling's fix.

Tier 7 – .NET mod loaders on ARM64

Upstream Wine c5a96a0b6c (Brendan Shanks, CodeWeavers; in Wine 11.4), cherry-picked by maxjivi05 (proton-wine PR #1):

• kernelbase – GetNativeSystemInfo() in x64 processes (memory.c). An x64 process under ARM64EC now gets PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE_AMD64, as on Windows, instead of ARM64. .NET 6 reported ARM64 from it, so MonoMod (Harmony, SMAPI, MelonLoader 0.7.x) wrote an ARM64 jump into x64 CoreCLR code and the runtime died with c000001d (FEX-Emu/FEX#6014, Droid-Deck/DroidDeck#611). Diagnosis by utkarshdalal (GameNative/proton-wine#94), report by whatsupbros.

Building

Builds run on GitHub Actions (ubuntu-24.04-arm, Valve's steamrt4 arm64 Proton SDK), like GE's aarch64 builds.

• Build DroidDeck-Proton (aarch64) – GE's configure.sh --target-arch=arm64, split into parallel groups (graphics, FEX, misc, media → Wine, then assemble). Output is stripped (Wine-Mono debug files removed) and packed as DroidDeck-Proton-<version>-aarch64.tar.gz + .sha512sum in GE's layout. Inputs: publish (release from main), prerelease (not marked latest), compare_with (diff against an earlier release).
• Caches – each group's output is keyed by its sources and skipped when cached; per-group ccache; SDK image cache.
• CI guards – Wine protocol and ntdll exports unchanged; tier 6 and 7 fixes and the winedmo row order fix present in source and binaries (trace strings); WoW Forever deferred patch markers after apply-deferred-game-patches.sh; no leftover "Banner-Proton" names.

Local builds: follow docs/README.GE-Proton.md, using banner-proton/prep.sh instead of patches/protonprep-valve-staging.sh and ../configure.sh --target-arch=arm64 --build-name=DroidDeck-Proton-<version> --display-name="DroidDeck-Proton <version>".

Credits

Valve (Proton, Wine, Steam Linux Runtime) · GloriousEggroll and GE-Proton contributors · Wine and wine-staging developers · CachyOS · NelloKudo · Etaash Mathamsetty · Elizabeth Figura (esync, fsync, ntsync) · maxjivi05 / DroidDeck (droiddeck-esync) · Arihany and GameNative (SD card fixes) · Brendan Shanks, utkarshdalal, whatsupbros (.NET fix) · arusiasotto (WoW ARM64EC fix) · Dmage22 (FEX-D2, Blizzard loader fixes) · oldschoola (linux_maplestory, MapleStory research) · TimmyTurner51 (fh6-wine-fex, ARM64X import thunk research) · FEX-Emu, DXVK, vkd3d-proton, dxvk-nvapi, d7vk and every patch author named in the commit history.

License

Proton and its components keep their own licenses: see LICENSE, LICENSE.proton and dist.LICENSE in the tarball. Wine is LGPL-2.1-or-later. DroidDeck-Proton's own scripts and patches follow the licenses of the files they change.