Steam Frame fixes

Unofficial fixes that let the native ARM64 World of Warcraft client run on Steam Frame, until the fixes land upstream in Wine, Proton and Mesa.

This repository provides:

• Proton Experimental ARM64 (Frame fixes): Valve's Proton Experimental for ARM64 with one Wine patch, installed as a Steam compatibility tool,
• Turnip: the Mesa Vulkan driver for Adreno GPUs built from upstream Mesa with two small patches,
• install-min.sh / uninstall-min.sh: one-command setup and removal on Steam Frame (desktop mode).

Everything is built from source, see Building from source.

Use at your own risk. Please read the disclaimer before installing.

Disclaimer

This is an unofficial, experimental community project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Valve, Blizzard Entertainment, the Wine project or Mesa, and Blizzard does not support playing its games on Linux, Wine or Proton.

You use this software entirely at your own risk. It is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind (see the license). The author is not responsible for any damage or loss it may cause, including to your device, your Steam installation, your game data or your game account.

This software was developed with heavy use of AI. The analysis, the patches, the build scripts, the installer and this documentation were largely written with the help of an AI assistant (Claude, by Anthropic) and tested by a human on a real Steam Frame. Treat it accordingly: read the scripts before running them, and report anything that looks wrong.

What is fixed

1. Crash at startup (Wine/Proton). The ARM64 client crashes right after creating its DirectX device (c0000005 at address 0). Its anti-tamper code calls system call stubs from its own copy of ntdll.dll, in which Wine's pointer to the system call dispatcher is zero. On x86_64 Wine keeps that pointer at a fixed address (0x7ffe1000) for exactly this reason; the patch does the same on ARM64. The same crash is reported in Winlator-Ludashi #632.

2. Shader compilation crash (Turnip). Steam Frame's system Turnip driver fails to compile two fragment shaders of the login screen (they use InterpolateAtSample) and then crashes in vkCreateGraphicsPipelines. A Turnip built from upstream Mesa compiles them fine (tested with all 144 combinations of MSAA, sample shading, pipeline type and subgroup size, versus 144 crashes with the system driver). The two Mesa patches add a NULL check that turns such a failure into an error instead of a crash, and log which compiler stage failed.

Requirements

• Steam Frame (SteamOS), in desktop mode with a terminal,
• the World of Warcraft ARM64 client installed through Battle.net (see Game setup),
• about 2.5 GB of free space (2 GB installed, plus the download).

Installation

1. Add Battle.net (or the game's ARM64 executable) to Steam as a non-Steam game, see Game setup.

2. Rename that shortcut to exactly WoW Forever (right-click it > Properties, the name field at the top).

3. Download install-min.sh from the latest release.

4. In desktop mode, open a terminal in the folder with the script and run:

   bash install-min.sh
   

5. Restart Steam and launch WoW Forever.

install-min.sh downloads the Proton and Turnip archives of its release (about 370 MB), verifies them against the release's SHA256SUMS and then (archives already next to the script are used instead of downloading):

• unpacks Proton into ~/.local/share/Steam/compatibilitytools.d/proton-frame-fixes/,

• unpacks Turnip into ~/.local/share/steam-frame-fixes/turnip/ and writes its Vulkan ICD file,

• sets the launch options of the WoW Forever shortcut to

  VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/home/<user>/.local/share/steam-frame-fixes/turnip/freedreno_icd.aarch64.json VK_DRIVER_FILES=/home/<user>/.local/share/steam-frame-fixes/turnip/freedreno_icd.aarch64.json %command%
  

  (replacing what was there; add PROTON_LOG=1 in front again if you need logs),

• selects Proton Experimental ARM64 (Frame fixes) as its compatibility tool.

Steam does not need to be closed; the changes are picked up after the restart (tested on Steam Frame). The script makes no backups of the Steam files it changes.

To set it up by hand instead, use the same two settings in the shortcut's Properties: Compatibility > force Proton Experimental ARM64 (Frame fixes), and General > Launch options as above.

Uninstalling

Download uninstall-min.sh from the release and run it, then restart Steam:

bash uninstall-min.sh

It removes both installed folders, our variables from the launch options of any shortcut that uses them (also if it was renamed) and the compatibility tool mappings to the Frame fixes Proton.

Why the launch options?

Steam runs Proton inside the Steam Runtime container (pressure-vessel), which sets VK_ICD_FILENAMES to the system driver when the container starts. Proton's user_settings.py only sets variables that are not set yet, so VK_ICD_FILENAMES in user_settings.py has no effect. Variables in the game's launch options are set before the container starts, and pressure-vessel then imports the driver they point to.

The driver is deliberately not installed system-wide (~/.local/share/vulkan/icd.d): that would change the driver of every game and show two Adreno 750 devices.

Game setup

1. Install Battle.net (x86) as a non-Steam game with Proton, in its own prefix, and install World of Warcraft with it.
2. Name the shortcut that starts the game WoW Forever and run install-min.sh (see Installation). This can be the Battle.net shortcut itself (tested on Steam Frame) or a separate non-Steam shortcut to the game's ARM64 executable: for World of Warcraft: Forever (beta) _classic_beta_/WowB-ARM64.exe in the game folder; other variants have similar names (e.g. Wow-ARM64.exe).
3. Started directly (without Battle.net), the game first shows a language and region selection window.

Existing prefixes

If the game's prefix was created with another Proton version, Proton updates it when you switch. If anything behaves oddly, try a fresh prefix. You can check that the prefix uses the fixed ntdll.dll:

python3 -c "import sys;d=open(sys.argv[1],'rb').read();print(d.count(bytes.fromhex('0010fe7f00000000')))" \
  ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/<appid>/pfx/drive_c/windows/system32/ntdll.dll

It prints several hundred with the fix and 0 without it.

Troubleshooting

1. Add PROTON_LOG=1 to the launch options, in front of the other variables, and start the game. Proton writes ~/steam-<appid>.log.

2. Check which Vulkan driver was used:

   grep -h 'with driver:' ~/steam-*.log | tail -n 3
   

   • Using "Turnip Adreno (TM) 750" with driver: "/home/.../steam-frame-fixes/turnip/libvulkan_freedreno.so" means this driver is used,
   • ... with driver: "/run/host/usr/lib/libvulkan_freedreno.so" means the system driver is used: the launch options are missing or mistyped.

3. MESA: error: compile failed! in the log means a shader failed to compile. With this driver the log also says which compiler stage failed (ir3: ... failed for ... shader); please open an issue with that line.

4. A crash with c0000005 and pc=0 means the game does not run with the Frame fixes Proton: check the compatibility tool and the prefix (see Existing prefixes).

Security and trust

• Releases are built from source by GitHub Actions; the build logs are public.
• All patches are in patches/ and are small enough to review.
• install-min.sh verifies the downloaded archives against the release's SHA256SUMS before unpacking them.
• Nothing modifies game files. install-min.sh only changes the launch options and the compatibility tool of the WoW Forever shortcut, and uninstall-min.sh removes those changes.

Building from source

Both components are built in Valve's Steam Runtime 4 SDK container for ARM64 (registry.gitlab.steamos.cloud/proton/steamrt4/sdk/arm64-llvm), so the results run on SteamOS.

GitHub Actions. The build workflow runs on GitHub's ARM64 runners, manually (workflow_dispatch) and for v* tags, where it publishes a release.

Any ARM64 Linux host with Docker (or Podman with CONTAINER_ENGINE=podman):

scripts/check-patches.sh               # patches apply to the pinned versions (any architecture)
scripts/build-turnip.sh                # a few minutes
scripts/build-proton.sh --ccache       # several hours, 30-40 GB of disk; re-run to resume
scripts/package.sh --version v1-test   # release files and SHA256SUMS in dist/

A cloud VM works too (for example an Azure Standard_D8ps_v6 with Ubuntu 24.04 ARM64). Turnip can also be built on x86_64 through qemu-user with scripts/build-turnip.sh --emulate; use qemu 10 or newer, as qemu 8.2 makes clang crash on some Mesa sources.

Pinned versions:

Component	Version
Proton	experimental-11.0-20260917b
Wine (Proton submodule)	debeec01b20ce07a0abc9a1876aa372259335d74
Mesa	e3a986f0167aa7d1c5cfd62a63362c65f5339373
Steam Runtime SDK	steamrt4/sdk/arm64-llvm:4.0.20260714.251823-0

Tests: tests/test_install_min.sh (no ARM64 or Steam needed) and scripts/check-patches.sh.

Contact

Questions, problems and reports are welcome as GitHub issues. Please include the relevant lines of ~/steam-<appid>.log (see Troubleshooting) and never post anything that identifies your game account.

Credits

• Wine and Proton (Valve, CodeWeavers and the Wine contributors),
• Mesa and its Turnip/freedreno developers,
• DXVK, vkd3d-proton and FEX, which are part of Proton,
• the analysis, patches and tooling were developed with the help of Claude (Anthropic).

License

The scripts and tools in this repository are under the MIT license. The patches and the built components are under the licenses of their projects: Wine is LGPL 2.1 or later, Proton's own files are under its BSD-style license, Mesa is MIT, and Proton bundles many other components under the GPL, LGPL, MPL, Apache, MIT, BSD and other licenses. Each release archive contains the license texts of its components in licenses/.

Every release built by CI also publishes the complete corresponding source of its binaries: proton-src-* (Proton with all its submodules, exactly as built, with the Wine patch applied), proton-src-downloads-* (the other sources the Proton build uses, such as wine-mono and wine-gecko) and wine-src-* (the patched Wine sources alone). The build scripts are in this repository at the release tag.

Trademarks

World of Warcraft, Warcraft, Battle.net and Blizzard Entertainment are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Steam, Steam Frame, Proton and Valve are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Valve Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Adreno is a trademark of Qualcomm Incorporated. Vulkan is a registered trademark of the Khronos Group Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. These names are used only to describe what this project is compatible with. This project is not affiliated with, sponsored or endorsed by any of these companies.