Credits

Groundwork

Viridite is not built from nothing. These are the projects, specifications and reverse-engineering efforts it stands on — several of them are the reason a given part works at all, and a few are the reason a bug got found.

Prior art — the same idea, done before

• so_util — TheOfficialFloW (Andy Nguyen). The original ELF-loading technique this whole scene rests on, first used to run Android games natively on PS Vita.
• Rinnegatamante, Bythos, frangarcj, CBPS and the wider Vita homebrew scene — who extended it across 45+ Android-to-Vita ports.
• max_nx — the direct Switch precedent, running Max Payne Mobile's real Android binary natively. Two concrete techniques came from reading it: a preflight check that the JIT syscalls exist before attempting a load, and writing a distinctive poison address into unresolved imports so reaching one crashes unmistakably instead of as an ordinary null dereference.
• ffd_nx — confirmation the approach generalises past a single game.

Switch platform

• switchbrew wiki — the reverse-engineered documentation of Horizon OS. Syscall semantics, memory-type tables, NRO layout and the application-record model behind forwarders all come from here.
• libnx — beyond using it, reading it settles questions. Disassembling its exception entry stub is how we learned that svcReturnFromException runs before the user handler, which ended an entire line of investigation into a loading hang.
• devkitPro / devkitA64 — toolchain and portlibs.
• Atmosphère — the CFW everything runs under, and the crash-report format used for post-mortems.
• libtesla and nx-ovlloader — the overlay runtime. Reading libtesla is how we found an overlay can reposition its own layer, which is what lets an install card sit over a HOME-menu tile instead of in a sidebar.

Android

• AOSP — the binary XML and resources.arsc formats the APK parser implements, and bionic, whose libc surface the shim table is written against.
• Material Design 3 — colour roles, the tonal-palette model, and the shape and motion scales the launcher is built to.
• Google Fonts — Roboto Flex and Material Symbols Rounded, bundled under the OFL.

Libraries and tools

• SDL2, SDL2_ttf, SDL2_image; minizip/zlib; libcurl over the Switch ssl sysmodule; stb.
• newlib and its dlmalloc-derived allocator — whose chunk layout and sysmalloc behaviour had to be understood in detail to diagnose the Brain It On! fault. The boundary-tag invariant the heap checker validates comes straight from that design.
• GNU binutils — objdump, readelf and nm. Most of the real diagnosis in this project has been reading AArch64 disassembly, of game binaries and of our own, rather than adding logging.

Written with Claude