SymphonyRecomp — Android

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, running natively on Android. Not an emulator — the PlayStation code is statically recompiled into C# and built into a real app.

I started this because Symphony of the Night is a work of art, and art deserves to be kept playable. I wanted it in my hands, on a handheld, running properly — not approximated. That's the whole reason this fork exists.

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Please read this first

The BlackLabelHQ team does not endorse this Android port, and it is not affiliated with them.

This fork was built with heavy AI assistance, verified by hand on real devices. The upstream project's position is that they value human work, and they intend to release their own Android port in their own time. That is their call and I respect it completely — their work is the foundation everything here stands on.

So, plainly:

• Do not open issues about this port on the BlackLabelHQ repo.
• Do not ask their Discord for support with this build.
• If you want the official Android experience, wait for theirs.
• Everything in this fork is maintained 100% by me. Bugs here are mine, not theirs.

This is also not the SOTN Decomp project. A recomp translates the original machine code; a decomp rebuilds the source by hand. Two different efforts, both worth your time, and the Decomp folks deserve enormous respect for what they're doing. Don't take questions about this port to their Discord either.

Forks and contributions are welcome here. Open a PR, fork it, take it somewhere I never would — that's the point.

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Download

Get the APK from the releases page →

Current release: Beta 0.10.1 — about 54 MB, Android 5.0 (API 21) or newer, arm64 or x64.

The APK holds no game data. You supply your own disc the first time you open it, and the app never asks again. If your device refuses the install, allow "install unknown apps" for whichever browser or file manager you downloaded it with.

Rather compile what you run? Build it yourself.

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You need your own copy of the game

No game data is distributed here, and none ever will be. You need a legally owned copy of the North American PlayStation release, dumped to bin/cue.

The app never ships with the disc. On first launch it asks for your files, copies them into its own storage, and never asks again. You can name them anything — the importer reads your .cue, pulls in exactly the tracks it names, and rewrites it to match. It checks the disc really is the USA release before accepting it, and tells you if you handed it a Japanese or European dump by mistake.

Building from source is separate. The recompiler has to read the disc to translate the game's code, so a copy must sit in disc/ at build time, named exactly as config/sotn.json expects:

Castlevania - Symphony of the Night (USA) (Track 1).bin
Castlevania - Symphony of the Night (USA) (Track 2).bin
Castlevania - Symphony of the Night (USA).cue

The .bin names only have to match whatever your .cue names internally — that block is just the layout a standard dump arrives in.

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What works

• Native performance. No emulator, no BIOS file.
• Bring your own disc. The app holds no game data and asks for your dump on first run. Swap it later from Game disc in the menu.
• Touch controls — full PSX overlay, switchable D-pad or virtual stick, adjustable opacity, and a HIDE toggle that gets the buttons out of the way.
• Physical controllers — Bluetooth, USB and handhelds (Retroid, Odin, Xbox, DualSense), with PlayStation / Xbox / Nintendo button layouts so the face buttons land where you expect.
• Save states — five slots.
• Memory cards — export a save to share or back up, import one from the desktop build or an emulator. Raw .mcr/.mcd/.sav plus DexDrive and VGS files.
• True widescreen — 16:9 and fit-to-screen render more of the level rather than stretching a 4:3 picture sideways.
• Quality of life — colour blind fixes, remove screen flashes, bug fixes, easy spell inputs, extra invincibility frames and more, all carried over from the desktop build.
• Cheats, stats and inventory — heal, level, gold, attributes, and a full item, relic and spell editor.
• Mods — compiled on device, so source mods work the same as they do on desktop.
• Display — 4:3, 16:9, stretch or auto-fit, with orientation lock. Settings persist between sessions.

It's a beta. Expect rough edges, and keep real in-game saves alongside your save states.

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Building it

You don't have to — there's a prebuilt APK — but building it yourself is the only way to change anything, and it's how you verify what you're running. What comes out holds no game data either way; every player supplies their own disc on first launch.

Budget an hour or so, mostly waiting on tool downloads.

1. Tools

• Git
• .NET 10 SDK
• A JDK (17 or newer) and the Android SDK — installing Visual Studio's .NET Multi-platform App UI development workload, or Android Studio, gets you both

Then:

dotnet workload install android

2. Source

Clone with submodules — the Android build needs the RecompOne runtime, and a plain clone will not build:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/sergiomanzur/SymphonyRecomp.git
cd SymphonyRecomp

Already cloned without it? git submodule update --init --recursive

3. Your disc files

Copy them into disc/, named as listed above. They must be in place before the next step, because the recompiler reads the disc to translate the game's code. They are not packaged into the APK — the finished app asks each player for their own copy.

4. Translate the game code

dotnet run --project RecompOne/RecompOne.Recompiler config/sotn.json

This is the recompilation step, and it's required — the Android build compiles the generated/ folder just like the desktop one. On Windows, windows_initial_build.bat does it for you.

5. Build the APK

dotnet publish RecompOne.SoTN.Android.csproj -c Release

Your APK lands at bin/Release/net10.0-android/com.blacklabelhq.sotn-Signed.apk.

6. Install it

Copy it to your device and tap it, or:

adb install -r bin/Release/net10.0-android/com.blacklabelhq.sotn-Signed.apk

Needs Android 5.0 (API 21) or newer, arm64 or x64.

On first launch it asks for your disc. Select the .cue and both .bin tracks together — long-press to multi-select — and it copies them in, which takes a minute or two. After that it boots straight to the game.

Once you're in, the ⚙ MENU button in the top corner opens everything.

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Known limitations

• Save states are best used within one session, and work most reliably when you save and load at similar moments. The emulated sound chip isn't captured in a state, so one loaded in a different area can play the wrong samples until the game reloads them.
• Importing copies the disc, so you need roughly 600 MB free on top of the app itself. The originals can be deleted afterwards.
• Desktop-only features — the map tracker, the randomizer panel — aren't in the Android menu yet.

Todo

• Map tracker and randomizer screens for Android.
• Ongoing: whatever breaks. Tell me about it.

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Credits

None of this exists without the people who did the hard part first.

• BlackLabelHQ — SymphonyRecomp itself. The recompilation, the patches, the widescreen work, the years of effort. This fork is a port of their achievement, nothing more.
• flaffy — RecompOne, the static recompiler this whole thing runs on.
• The SOTN Decomp community — for the reverse engineering that made so many function names and patches possible. Go support them.
• Konami and KCET, 1997 — for making something people still care about this much, three decades later.

If you enjoy this, the right thing to do is go star the upstream project.