Anbernic RG35XX Custom Firmware Guide

[Music] hey everybody this is Russ from Retro Game core today we're going to take a second look at the ambernik rg35xx this is one of my favorite devices from ambernik it's super cheap it's around 50 before shipping but it has a nice nostalgic design great buttons and controls and then also we have some pretty good custom firmware options as well and that's mostly what we're going to focus on in this video today the first custom firmware that was available was called garlic OS that was a super simple interface and just worked and so I really liked that one however there are now some new options available and some of these have features that are not in garlic OS for example there's one that actually can play Nintendo 64 Dreamcast and PlayStation Portable games those are systems I never expected to play on a device that cost around fifty dollars but here we are so in this video I'm going to do a Showcase of all the different firmwares that we have available for the rg35xx to see whether or not you want to dabble in one of them yourself and so without any further delay let's go ahead and Dive Right In [Music] okay let's go ahead and start with garlic OS since this was the first custom firmware out of the gate now this is a very simple operating system here that is modeled after onion OS which is on a different device those are on the Mio mini and the Mio Mini Plus and I would classify this one as having a graphic centered user interface and this setup here is pretty simple I've made videos about it before but essentially once you've added your games you will just navigate through the various systems and then go through the menu and pick your game now there are some more advanced topics like the ability to add your own box art and I have a whole written guide for this device which will walk you through the installation and customization of garlic OS and these other operating systems and I'll leave all that link down below either way yes I think of the navigation experience here is really simple and intuitive plus there is a favorites menu which is really handy if you want to trim down your game list and then one of the other highlights is the recent section this will allow you to go through and see various save states of the games that you've been playing recently and this is one of my favorite experiences right here you just get a snapshot of the game and you can just jump in and out and this is similar setup with onion OS on the Neo mini devices another handy feature with garlic OS is that you can do a quick save shutdown so in the middle of a game you can just hold on to the power button and it'll turn it right off and then when you start it back up again it'll go right back to the game you were playing and the exact spot where you were and then of course when tapping the menu button it'll save your game and then bring you back to that recents menu so yes overall I like the Simplicity of garlic OS the ability to jump in and out of your games and everything just kind of has an easy intuitive graphic interface and if you'd like it does have a direct access to retroarch if you want to tweak things yourself as well and last I heard garlic West is actually shipping with the rg35xx if you buy one today so that's kind of nice to be able to have this firmware available from day one without having to install it yourself another custom firmware that I have mentioned before on my channel is this one here called menui and this one has a long development history on several different platforms but the main gist of it is that this is a text based interface it's super simple too and all this is done on purpose to make it a very clean and focused experience and I found this to be a very refreshing experience menu Y is easily the most lightweight and snappiest of all the firmwares we're going to show off here today I love the ability to just jump in and out of these games super fast another thing I love is that it has a universal option system that was built from the ground up so if you're in a game and you press the menu button you will get this interface popping up and this is also very simple but super intuitive for example we can save our game right here and then also load it right back up and then the menu options here is tailor-made for each system and Incredibly robust in addition each emulator core will have a ton of options that are tailored specifically for that emulated system and to top it all off on the bottom it actually explains what each of these do which is super helpful as well and this has just about every customization option you can think of for each of these systems and you can save them as a per game or per system configuration and one of the best things about minui is that if you don't want to go into the options and Fiddle around with the settings you really don't have to almost everything's already been optimized and pre-configured for you right out of the box and this one also has some really nice quality of life features like the ability to quick save and power off much like with garlic OS so if you're in the middle of game you can just turn it off right there and then when you start it right back up it'll go right to where you were in fact the only nitpick I have for this entire firmware is the fact that it doesn't auto save and auto load when you close a game so you will have to go into the menu options here and then tap on the save button before you actually quit but other than that I think that the robust options that we have here within mini Y and the very simple and Universal interface makes this one a winner too okay so those are the two most stable firmwares that we have for the rg35xx now let's talk about some of the more experimental and new ones to start there's actually a build of badocera that works on the rg35xx now initially this was made by a developer named Acme plus and this was more of a proof of concept because by comparison to something like minui bottasera is a bit of a heavyweight operating system so I think that maybe it might be a little bit too much for for the amount of RAM and specs that we have on this very low power device however as you can see here yes it's working and many lightweight games will play so if you wanted to have something with a badassera interface and you wanted to play like Nintendo and Super Nintendo yes that will totally work here and this has all those great customization features that you can find within bottasera however this unofficial Port of batasera didn't get a lot of traction and development stopped a few months ago and that's because the developer who was working on it moved on to a new project and that's what we're going to cover next this one here is called koriki and this is made by a team of different developers including the one who made that bottasera Port but also some other veteran developers of the Retro handheld scene now this one has a lot of similarities between badassera for example it runs with retroarch cores for the most part in the background but then also there are some Standalone emulators that have been ported over as well and if you've been around the Retro handheld scene for a while this user interface might look a little familiar and that's because it's using a Linux based app called Simple menu and simple menu was a front-end that was available for some older devices including the amarnik rg350 which you can see right here this was actually one of the very first retro handhelds that I bought back in the summer of 2020 and this is running a custom firmware image called atom and I made a bunch of videos about this one as well and this is an older version of that firmware I just haven't updated it because you actually have to take this device apart to get to that internal SD card either way yes this is using simple menu just like how it is on the new kodiki firmware on the rg35xx and there were a bunch of different handhelds that actually used that atom firmware image which was backed with simple menu the ambernik rd280v was one of my favorite small handhelds for quite some time this is it right here and it makes sense that the simple menu front end that is on the atom custom firmware image is also in koriki because a lot of the developers that were on the team for the custom atom firmware image are also on koriki now so if anything I would say this is a continuation of those development efforts from a couple years back now the way the simple menu works is that everything is organized by different type of system So within the console section you can navigate through the different home consoles but then also there's the handheld section where you'll see portable systems you know like Game Boy Game Boy Color or the PSP and then same thing will go with arcade consoles as well as home computer systems so the way that you navigate through simple menu is to basically choose what type of system you want to play and then navigate through those and then pick your game from there the game will launch and for the most part it'll be using a retroarch core and you have access to all those back-end retrowork options in case you want to tweak the settings yourself now when it comes to more simple systems like up through the 16-bit era all these are going to play just fine this is a relatively Plug and Play experience between just choosing your game then launching it and then you press the select and start button together to get back into the main menu so overall this is a pretty simple experience once you get used to the controls and how to navigate through the systems but I wouldn't say it's quite as intuitive as something like garlic Os or minui now one feature I think is really unique with koriki is that it actually will still work with a garlic Os or min Nui SD card for example here's the second SD card from my garlic OS build what I can do here is use the koriki card as my first card and then the second one here now when I started the device it's going to recognize the folder system for either garlic West or minui and so now I can play those exact same games but with kodiki firmware for example here is my Pico 8 Library which I did not load onto my kodiki card this is from my garlic OS card so I think that's really handy if you just want to try out this system without having to go through the process of moving over all of your games or the box art and all that other stuff now this firmware is still in a beta state it is not at a full release just yet but from what I've seen I think this should be coming pretty soon but there are still some elements that are a little bit rough around the edges so let me show those off real quick for example with minui and garlic OS they've done some really incredible scaling effects to make sure that everything looks nice and balanced and at least from a cursory look here with koriki I'm not seeing that for example with the Mega Man life bar you can see it's out of balance this means you may have to look into applying a filter or something else if you do want to make sure that you you have perfectly balanced pixels so when it comes to just overall scaling with these retro systems I did find that out of the Box menu eye and garlic OS were just a little bit better additionally I found that performance with PlayStation 1 in particular was not as good as I was hoping within garlic OS and mini y you can play just about every single game some of them will require a little bit of an overclock but all the same there's no single game that I found that is unplayable on those two firmware's however unfortunately I did find some dramatic slowdowns with the koriki firmware when trying to play Playstation 1. [Applause] now if you press start when you're in the main menu you can go into the system settings and actually turn on an overclock and also it looks like they're building out the ability to make per game overclock options as well however as far as I could tell even changing the CPU clock speed did not improve the performance with PlayStation 1. now granted bloody Roar 2 is kind of a test game in the sense that it's one of the hardest to run however I did find that even more lightweight games like crash team racing did not play at full speed so in particular if you're looking to have a perfect PlayStation 1 experience then at least right now koriki is not a good bet however there are some huge performance advantages with other systems and easily the number one most exciting of those is going to be Nintendo 64. now there's a few things happening here in the background number one they've unlocked the GPU performance with this particular chipset and as far as I know that's not something they've been able to accomplish with garlic West and minui and it just so happens that this makes a lot of Nintendo 64 games relatively playable now as a caveat here this is using a standalone Nintendo 64 emulator so unfortunately I can't show show you the frames per second here on the screen and I will mention that you will still get some cracks and stutters especially on the audio side when trying to play these games in fact there wasn't a single Nintendo 64 game that I found that did not have at least a little bit of stuttering here and there however I was still really surprised at how well many of these games played even some more heavyweight games like f-zero X was still relatively playable I guess the way I see it is that if you were specifically looking for perfect Nintendo 64 emulation this is not going to be it if anything I would say the performance here is a little bit worse than on the rk3326 devices that's going to include devices like the ambernik rg351v and so on but you also have to bear in mind that those devices are around the 100 price point this is a 50 handheld and this is probably the best I've ever seen when it comes to Nintendo 64 on a 50-ish dollar device so I guess the way I'm looking at it is that yes this is a device that is meant to be played up through PlayStation 1 but now thanks to the koriki firmware Nintendo 64 is not half bad to summarize I would say that if you're just really looking to play a couple Nintendo 64 games here and there especially if they're the more lightweight titles then I think it might be worth your time to at least try this out and see if maybe your favorite game will work if anything I think this is a huge bonus for the rg35xx now there's also some other Advanced systems that are supported with kodiki firmware and that includes Sega Dreamcast but unfortunately every single game I tried was not at a playable speed so this was more like a novelty than anything in just the fact that it's pretty cool that it runs in the first place but all the same even the most lightweight titles like Cosmic smash did not play at full speed now PlayStation Portable is also one that is supported and this one was pretty interesting too there were some lightweight games specifically puzzle games that played at full speed Bust A Move Deluxe right here as you can see is running just great however when you start moving up to the harder to play games this thing just basically falls apart for example with Virtual Tennis World Tour this game is playing at about half speed altogether now I'm using the Standalone PSP emulator and this does have a pretty robust set of options and one of them includes forcing a frame Skip and I found that putting a frame skip of one on some of these more middleweight games is not half bad for example I would say that Virtual Tennis here is at least somewhat playable you're still going to get some slowdowns here and there and the animations aren't going to be as smooth because we're skipping every other frame but all the same it is pretty neat to be able to try out some of your favorite games to see if they work in particular I think this might work out pretty well for some role-playing games now moving on let's try one more firmware this one is called muos which I think originally was called mustard OS and this one's here is pretty unique and I think it's only developed by one person altogether and what sets this one apart is that it's based on retrowork as you can see through the menu system right here yeah we're just basically running a modified version of that app and so you will have to have a fair understanding of how retroarch Works in order to set this up in the first place for example you'll have to create playlists and then have them all set up so this is definitely not a firmware for the faint of heart and someone who wants a plug and play experience but this one also seems to have not quite as much polish as some of the other options for example one of the things I noticed right right off the bat is that side scrolling games have a lot of frame pacing issues in addition it looks like there's a little bit of screen tearing going on too you can kind of see how the screen here in Castlevania is wobbling left and right and if you keep watching you'll probably see a couple hiccups here and there so unfortunately the smooth gameplay that I was hoping for was some of these lower end systems isn't quite here just yet so it does look like some of these firmware elements need a little bit more polish and refinement however there are still some pretty interesting things about muos for example near the bottom here you can see there's a menu option for extras and if we go inside there's some pretty neat functions and ideas within for example you can set up your date and time and then also within the utilities function they have an activity tracker and you can update your playlists and you can even test out your inputs in case one of the buttons is not working properly in addition there's a boot options menu and within here you can do things like setup HDMI and it looks like there's some appearance tweak options as well so overall I would say that muos is still a work in progress but it does show some promise if you're familiar with retrowork this might be a very lightweight and easy easy to navigate system for you now one of my favorite things about the ambernik rg35xx is that it has an HDMI out port on the top so next up I want to run through all the different firmware options and how they work with HDMI out starting with muos you can see here that the HDMI out is functioning but unfortunately the only thing I could do was get the muos logo to show up on my TV when it came to gameplay as well as sound it still remained on the device so at least right now I don't see this as being very functional moving over to garlic OS this one does work right out of the box one of the things I appreciate is that it'll turn off the device screen so you're saving battery life and also the audio will come out of the HDMI cable and not the device however one thing that is kind of a bummer with garlic OS is that it doesn't scale properly it just scales the full screen now a lot of TVs and monitors have the ability to stretch it back to 4x3 and so if that is the case you could do that instead and one of the unfortunate parts of garlic OS is that the scaling options right here are not very robust and so as much as I'd like to just change the scale failing options to be able to make it thinner and then kind of balance out to a 4x3 garlic os does not have that ability so this is something that will probably have to come in a software update down the line either way if you have the ability to stretch to 4x3 within your TV or monitor it's not going to be an issue but if you don't you will have to get used to playing games at a more stretched aspect ratio now moving over to bottasera even though this one is a test firmware I did want to actually show off that it does work with HDMI out as well this one also will scale full screen but the nice thing here is that retroarch has the full scaling options within the video settings so all I have to do here is just change the scaling to something else for example 8x7 with Super Nintendo this will scale it down quite a bit so you do have black bars on the left and right it's still going to be a little bit wider than 4x3 but it's much better than 16x9 however one thing to bear in mind is the audio is coming out of the device and not the HDMI output next we're going to move over to menu I this one is also very plug and play all you have to do is just hook everything up and it'll start working and by default this one will also go into full screen but the nice thing about this one is we have a bunch of different emulator options so within the options menu you'll find some scaling configurations and you got a bunch of different options here but one of my favorites is the native one this is actually going to run everything at an integer scale that means if you want perfectly sharp pixels then you can have that here so when it comes to having a bunch of different scaling options without having to memorize how to navigate it through retroarc then Min UI is actually a really good solution here and thankfully this one will also turn off the screen on the device as you're playing it so you will have longer battery life the only downside that I found is that the audio comes out of the device and not the TV and that's kind of unfortunate okay and finally let's test out the HDMI function of koriki first thing off the bat you'll notice that it is playing on the device as well as on the TV screen and it is going to stretch it to full screen however this one also has the full robust Suite of retroarch options so for example here with Sega Genesis I'm going to choose an aspect ratio of one by one or a square image and because it's going to stretch it out when we get to the TV it actually looks very close to 4x3 so for me I would say this is perfectly playable and again of course if you do have a TV or monitor that can stretch down to 4x3 you can use that as well the only complaint I have here is that it's also still playing on the screen of the device which is a little bit distracting also bear in mind that some Standalone emulators like the one for Nintendo 64 doesn't have any scaling options so this one you will have to scale on the monitor TV manually either way it's cool to see that all of these actually have HDMI out working but to various degrees okay and so in wrapping things up here let's just kind of put it all together in terms of just general use case and what I recommend if you are looking at trying any of these out number one I think you should try any of them that interest you just to see whether or not it's going to be good fit and after a few days of testing all these different options I've still found that garlic OS is probably the best match for my particular gameplay I like the fact that it is simple to navigate but then I also have the ability to see the box art if I'd like and I also feel like this firmware has been tweaked with the user in mind so the ability to jump into your recent section and see all your games at once and then also having your favorites here on on the home screen is just super intuitive as well so at least when it comes to my daily driver I do think I'm going to be sticking with garlic OS I do like the Simplicity here however I really appreciate the Simplicity of minui as well in fact this is the other operating system that I use the most besides garlic OS I love the fact that everything is super Snappy and intuitive but then you have access to all the options if you'd like in fact I plan on making a video about this particular operating system here soon because I think this is one of the best options you can get if you are making a system to give to somebody else as a gift I've been doing that a bunch with friends and family and I generally will put menu y or its other Forks onto those systems because they work really well and then also I do have to give mad props to koriki it's amazing that we even have Nintendo 64 gameplay on this operating system and the setup for this operating system is super simple as well a lot easier than it was on the original atom firmware and the way I see it if you have even just a little bit of interest in trying out Nintendo 64 games on a super budget device like this then I think that investing in an s d card and flashing koriki to it is going to be well worth your time you might be surprised how many Nintendo 64 games played a decent speed so I think in summary what I'm going to end up doing is having garlic Os or minui as my main daily driver but I am most definitely keeping that koriki SD card around as well if I want to pop it in and try out a Nintendo 64 game too and bear in mind we still haven't seen an official final release from kodiki yet so it may be that things are going to get even better over time anyway let me know what you think in the comments below do you have an ambernik rg35xx and what firmware are you using and also what do you think about the fact that we can now play Nintendo 64 on a device that cost around fifty dollars it's kind of crazy as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 196,214

Keywords:

Id: 0dqBg6fEvfQ

Length: 20min 45sec (1245 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 23 2023