A focused fix for A Crack in Time
ARMSX3 0.9.7.3 is a small maintenance release for the Android PlayStation 3 emulator. Its release notes focus on Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, where the game could freeze or crash during sections involving time manipulation. The project reports testing the fix on eight elite devices using Turnip Gen 8 V35; that is a project compatibility claim, not a guarantee for every Android phone or graphics driver.
The issue involved reading textures back from the GPU. In one path, ARMSX3 could write beyond a texture’s allocated memory and overwrite adjacent data, potentially resulting in GPU errors, a freeze, or a crash. The notes also identify a timing-related crash in the texture-readback path. Users who encountered failures in the affected sections are encouraged by the release notes to try the game again with this version.
Android packages and project context
The release provides Android APK variants for armv8.2 devices targeting SDK 30, SDK 33, and SDK 35, alongside a legacy armv8.1 package targeting SDK 30. These are host-platform builds: ARMSX3 is intended to emulate PlayStation 3 software on Android hardware, rather than being a release for installation on a modified PS3 console.
ARMSX3 uses upstream RPCS3 code and includes recent ARM64 improvements, according to the project README. Running the emulator requires PlayStation 3 firmware, which the project says is not included. The README also describes an Android build process using the Android SDK, NDK r27 or newer, CMake 3.30 or newer, and JDK 17, but those requirements apply to compiling the project rather than ordinary use of the supplied APKs.
Beyond the crash and GPU-related corrections described above and the listed Android package variants, the supplied release notes do not describe broader emulator changes, new compatibility targets, performance improvements, or additional game-specific fixes.
