Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks for Android

An unofficial native Android port of the original Xbox version of Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, with touch controls, controller and keyboard support and extended graphics options.

The game's x86 code is statically recompiled ahead of time to C++ with XboxXBE-Recomp, then built for arm64. Drawing goes through Vulkan, and windowing, input and audio through SDL3. No emulator is involved. The Android host (Vulkan renderer, DirectSound, touch controls, settings panel) comes from Black-Android.

Gameplay on a Xiaomi Pad 7 at 60 FPS (watch on YouTube).

[!NOTE] This project does not include any game assets. You must provide the files from your own legally acquired copy of the game to install or build.

[!WARNING] Work in progress. The port builds, but it has not been played through on a device yet. See Status.

Installation

1. Install the APK.
2. Open Shaolin Monks and allow all files access when it asks (on Android 10, the storage permission).
3. Copy the game into /storage/emulated/0/ShaolinMonks, or into a ShaolinMonks folder at the top of your SD card: either the disc image (.iso) or default.xbe with the rest of the disc's files and folders (GAMEDATA.WA*, front, English, classic, ...). The app creates the folder on the phone's storage once access is allowed, and starts the game as soon as it finds the files.

If you don't grant that access, Android/data/com.racas.shaolinmonks/files/assets works too.

Settings (shaolinmonks.toml, android.toml, layout.toml), saves (hdd), logs and the shader cache are stored in Android/data/com.racas.shaolinmonks/files.

The disc is the same for the USA and Europe releases (one default.xbe, SHA-1 20e283c44fdb6062a760e4732d765036bac18067).

Features

The settings panel opens from the gear at the top left of the screen (or F10 on a keyboard). Android's back button is the controller's Start, which pauses the game.

Graphics

• Render Resolution: 20% to 200% of the screen's height, instead of the original 640x480.
• V-Sync, Max Frame Rate (unlimited, the display's refresh rate or a custom cap) and an FPS Counter.
• Anisotropic Filtering, applied to all textures.

Touch Controls

A full Xbox controller on the screen:

• The left side of the screen is the left stick, wherever your thumb comes down. A drag on the right side of the screen is the right stick.
• A, B, X, Y in the controller's diamond and colours, Black and White, the triggers, Start, Back and a D-pad.
• Controls Layout: Default (triggers at the top corners) or Low Triggers, with the controls' opacity and overall size.
• Edit Controls Position: drag each control where you want it. To resize one, select it and tap − or +, or pinch it with a second finger.

Other Input

• Controller: any controller SDL3 supports, with rumble. The touch controls hide while a controller is in use.
• Keyboard, with every controller button and both sticks rebindable: WASD the left stick, Space/K/L/J/I the face buttons, Q/E the triggers, the arrows the D-pad, Enter Start.

General

• Language: English, French, German, Italian or Spanish. The game takes it from the console's language setting, which this sets; it applies at the next start. Indonesian translates the settings panel and plays the game in English.
• Audio Output: automatic, mono, stereo or 5.1 surround.
• Background Pause: the game and its sound pause while the app is in the background.

Status

• xbe_symbols finds 183 of the 238 XDK functions and 11 of the 12 data symbols the host knows; the ones it misses are the network stack (XNet, Winsock), Bink and the memory unit type, which the game doesn't use. Four more were resolved by hand in config/game.toml.
• MK II and the bonus demo don't run. The game plays the unlockable Mortal Kombat II by starting another program on the disc, jarvos.xbe (Midway's arcade emulator), and The Suffering: Ties That Bind demo with Suffering2_Gold.xbe. The Android host can't switch to another executable yet, so picking either one closes the app.
• Nothing game-specific is patched yet: no widescreen FOV, frame rate unlock or cheats. The game runs at its own frame rate and 4:3 picture, letterboxed.

Logs are in Android/data/com.racas.shaolinmonks/files. Please include the log when reporting a problem.

System Requirements

• Android 10 or newer, arm64.
• GPU with a Vulkan 1.1 driver, for example Adreno 6xx or newer, Mali-G7x or newer, or Xclipse.
• Memory: 4 GB.
• Storage: 4 GB for the game files and saves.

Building

Building requires a Windows PC.

1. Clone this repository

2. Add the game files

Put default.xbe in assets/, or put the disc image (.iso) in assets/ or iso/. The build extracts default.xbe from the image.

3. Install the dependencies

• Visual Studio 2022 with Desktop development with C++. The recompiler runs on the PC.
• Android Studio. In its SDK Manager, install Android SDK Platform 34, NDK 28.2.13676358 and CMake 3.31.6. Gradle needs Java 17 to 21 (JAVA_HOME).
• Python, needed only to extract default.xbe from a disc image.

4. Build

Run build.bat. It builds the recompiler, recompiles the xbe into generated/game, then builds app/build/outputs/apk/release/app-release.apk with Gradle. The first build compiles the whole game for arm64 and takes 30 to 90 minutes.

Install the APK with:

adb install -r app/build/outputs/apk/release/app-release.apk

The SDK is vendored in sdk/, at the upstream commit in sdk/UPSTREAM_COMMIT, with one change: the console's language comes from app::ConsoleLanguage() (sdk/runtime/kernel/xboxkrnl.cpp).

Support

If you'd like to support the project, you can do so on SociaBuzz.

Credits

• XboxXBE-Recomp by TGP482: the static recompiler and the portable runtime (Xbox kernel, XDK libraries and Direct3D 8) this port is built on.
• Black-Android by RanggaCasper: the Android host this port is built from.
• Zukiru: the HDR screen filter.
• SDL, glslang, toml++ and Dear ImGui.
• xemu and Cxbx-Reloaded, which XboxXBE-Recomp used as references for Xbox hardware and API behavior.

Mortal Kombat is a trademark of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.