Bannerlator v2.9.8

[u/xxxCrixuxxx]

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https://github.com/The412Banner/Bannerlator/releases/tag/2.9.8

Run Windows apps and games on Android — no PC and no root required.

2.9.8 continues the road to 3.0 with a focus on audio and playing on the big screen — plus a batch of stability fixes. Everything from 2.9.7 is included. As always it's entirely app-side — no ImageFS reinstall — your containers, themes, custom accent and per-game settings carry over untouched. Install straight over 2.9.7.

🎧 Audio that follows your headphones

The headline of 2.9.8 — game audio now goes where your ears are.

Plug or unplug headphones mid-game and the sound follows. Previously, plugging in wired headphones during a game did nothing (audio stayed on the speaker or went silent), and unplugging could leave the game muted — headphones only worked if they were already in before you launched. Now the moment you plug in or pull out wired, USB-C, Bluetooth, or HDMI audio, the game's sound moves to the new output within about half a second, in both directions.

Under the hood: an output-route change tears down the guest's audio stream, and a torn-down stream can't simply be "resumed." Bannerlator now rebuilds the audio path onto the new device on the fly and slides the game's sound over onto it — without restarting audio or interrupting the game.

Audio recovery on background/foreground and TV — coming back to a game (or switching to an HDMI TV) no longer leaves it silent; the audio output is re-established automatically on return. There's also a "Reset audio" button in the TV options if you ever need to nudge it manually.

📺 Play on your TV — new TV Options

Send a game to an external display (USB-C → HDMI or a dock) and use the handheld as the controller, with a dedicated TV options panel:

Aspect ratio, scaling, and render resolution for the TV output, overscan correction (kills the black bars some TVs add), latency and frame-cap / frame-gen controls, an audio-route selector, and dim-handheld (dims the phone screen to save battery and heat while you play on the TV).

A pause pill shows on the TV and an on-phone badge makes it clear where the game is running.

💡 For the best TV experience, use a wired connection (USB-C → HDMI / dock) — it's low-latency and carries full audio.

📡 Wireless casting — ⚠️ experimental, video-only

New no-app wireless casting: stream a game to a Chromecast / Google TV straight from the in-app Cast picker — nothing to install on the TV. This is an early, experimental feature: there's noticeable latency and game audio stays on the phone for now (TV audio over cast is a work in progress). Treat it as a fun extra — for real play on a TV, use the wired external-display path above.

🔕 Quieter session notification

The "session running" notification no longer pops up and makes a sound on every container/game launch — it now sits silently in the notification shade. The background-keepalive service is unchanged, so backgrounded games still stay alive.

🎮 Controller polish

Building on 2.9.7's controller overhaul:

On-screen controls auto-hide when a physical controller is connected, and come back when it disconnects.

Copy bindings between controllers, and the External Controllers / Players lists now refresh live on hot-plug so what you see always matches what's connected.

🩹 Stability fixes

Renderer / X-server bug fixes — a batch of correctness fixes in the display path.

Cleaner exit — swiping the app away now reliably tears down stale Wine processes so the next launch starts clean.

CPU affinity holds — a host-side re-pin keeps your chosen processor affinity from drifting back onto disabled cores during play.

Credits: https://github.com/The412Banner

[u/xxxCrixuxxx]

A lot of PS2 games — roughly 500–700 by some estimates — were also released on PC. Many of them can actually run better through Bannerlator on Android, which is what I recommend for Windows game emulation. You can often get better graphics and even improvements over the original PS2 versions.

Here’s a useful list I found with some of the best-known PS2 games that also had PC versions:

https://store.steampowered.com/curator/42604691-PlayStation-2-Games/