Requirements:
- A flash drive or two
- This specific, weird old hybrid tabletbook (the T100TA)
- An iso of Android x86 4.4 r5
- Some kind of LiveUSB situation that includes a 32-bit bootloader, even though the CPU of this vexing thing is 64-bit (MX Linux works)
- A copy of Genymotion-ARM-Translation_v1.1.zip
- A copy of the 4.0.8.45720 folder of RProp's libhoudini repository on Github
Instructions, by which I mean "what I did":
- Use LiveUSB to prepare the eMMC for Android KitKat. GPT scheme, a ~100MB FAT32 partition for ESP, and the whole rest of that bad boy ext3. Not ext4; I tried.
- Make a bootable drive from the Android iso, boot it, and install to the ext3 partition. Choose yes on read/write and installing grub.
- Reboot to the LiveUSB. Mount the ext3 partition and open a file manager there as root - I have no idea whether this is necessary.
- Add this nonsense to the end of Android's /system/build.prop file:
ro.product.cpu.abilist=x86,armeabi-v7a,armeabi
ro.product.cpu.abilist32=x86,armeabi-v7a,armeabi
ro.dalvik.vm.isa.arm=x86
ro.enable.native.bridge.exec=1
- Find the function "do_init()" in Android's /system/etc/init.sh file and add these lines inside of it at the same level of indentation as their neighbors, directly above the line "postinit":
mount -t binfmt_misc none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc
echo ':arm_exe:M::\\x7f\\x45\\x4c\\x46\\x01\\x01\\x01\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x02\\x00\\x28::/system/bin/houdini:P' > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register
echo ':arm_dyn:M::\\x7f\\x45\\x4c\\x46\\x01\\x01\\x01\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x03\\x00\\x28::/system/bin/houdini:P' > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register
- Take a copy of the "system" folder from that RProp repo and paste it onto a copy of the "system" folder from that Genymotion zip. Replace any files that already exist.
- Take the folder resulting from step #6 and paste it onto Android's /system/ folder. Replace any files that already exist.
And that's it (well actually, you might need to set the permissions for the houdini file and enable_houdini script in /system/bin to executable; I'm not sure). You can now play that touchscreen version of Uplink that you've wanted to play ever since you were a kid and you got your hopes up about it when you saw it was in a Humble Bundle, but then realized it was only for tablets and you didn't have a tablet. Easy as that.