GarlicOS is Here! Anbernic RG35XX Custom Firmware Guide

[Music] hey everybody this is Russ from Metro gamecorp today I'm excited to show off a new custom firmware for the ambernik rg35xx now I did an Impressions video about this little budget handheld about three weeks ago and in that video one of my main complaints was the stock operating system that came with it well today I'm here to show you garlic OS this is a custom firmware built by black serif that works for the device and once again I find myself Amazed by the fact that custom firmware can often transform the feel of a device this simple interface is very Bare Bones but exactly how I like it here we can browse through our most recently played games we can create a favorites folder and then also navigate through our consoles and games and on top of that this operating system runs on a retroarc back end and has some newly installed cores as well and so not only do we have a streamlined interface but we have some improvements to the overall simulation and thanks to the fact that this is running on retroarch I think we're up to about 30 different systems that can be emulated on this device now not only that it has a bunch of quality life features like auto save and auto loading when you close out of your games and now it also has a proper sleep function which won't drain the battery excessively now garlic OS is brand new it's only been out for a few days now but I've spent quite some time going through it and so even though it's still kind of inactive development I think we're ready to make a guide and so in this video I'm going to show you how to set it all up from scratch but I'll also show you how to update it as more developments come in the future we got a lot of ground to cover and so without any further delay let's jump into it foreign [Music] I have a written guide as always and so you can go here and kind of navigate through everything right now and so this will be a great reference point if you're just now getting started with retro handhelds and in case I missed something here in the video and I'll also keep this up to date as Time Marches On in case there are some big changes to the overall guide either way long story short be sure to check out my website for the most up-to-date information now for this setup we're going to use two different SD cards the one on the left will be our system card this one can be as small as four gigabytes I'm gonna use 16 because that's what I have now the card on the right is going to be our games card this can be any size as well I think 128 gigs is probably the maximum size you're going to want to use personally if I had one laying around I probably would have used a 64 gigabyte card instead after all the rg35xx is not the most powerful system in the world and so the only big file systems that are actually going to run on this are going to be PlayStation 1 Sega CD as well as PC engine or Turbo graphic CD other than those three systems all the other ones are going to be very small and so you can fit a lot of them on smaller cards also if you're just getting started you're going to want to have a micro SD card reader to be able to interface with your computer and so if you don't have an SD card reader directly in your computer you may want to get something like this I'll have links to all this in the written guide below now in order to get all this working we are going to have to download a couple free software tools just to get started number one we're going to want to have 7-Zip because the file we're going to use is actually compressed using this file system the next one is going to be belena etcher this is going to flash an image file onto our SD card and finally we have another one called disk genius to allow us to manipulate the files within the SD card now garlic OS comes courtesy of black serif and his work for the community this operating system is hosted on his patreon page but it's available free for anyone all you have to do here is just scroll down to the bottom and you'll have two options the first option is to actually paste some files directly on top of the stock operating system car but as you may remember from my Impressions video the card that ambernick uses is a cheap generic card that is prone to failure and so instead I recommend using the other file option that we have which is a full SD card image that we can Flash to a new SD card and so that's what we're going to do today using that 16 gigabyte card that I showed a moment ago anyway just go ahead and download that image and then save it to wherever you'd like I'm just going to save it in my downloads once you have it downloaded go ahead and right click on it and select open with 7-Zip from there click on extract and it'll take those files and put them over into the downloads folder and so here we are we have the garlic image file which we're going to flash to an SD card then we also have a readme text file which will explain the whole process we're going to do right here so now let's go ahead and Flash the image to the SD card using ballena etcher so go ahead and open up the app and then select Flash from file from there navigate to The Garlic image file and hit open next you want to make sure you're flashing to your SD card I already have mine plugged in so that's why you see it there and then just go ahead and tap flash it's going to ask do you really want to do this and you say yeah man I want to do it it'll take a few minutes to flash and then verify the Flash worked correctly and then after that you may get a bunch of pop-ups like this if you do don't worry about it just go ahead and hit OK and then cancel for each of these now if we go over to this PC you can see that there are four different partitions associated with this SD card and two of those partitions don't have any data related to them either so now what we're going to do is modify those partitions using that disc Genius app that I mentioned before and then here on the left you can see there is the generic SD card with the four partitions and of those four partitions there's only one of them we really want to mess with and that's the one that's formatted to a FAT32 file system and as you can see this one is associated on my computer with the drive letter G if it doesn't have a letter next to it go ahead and right click on it and select assign new Drive letter anyway because I already have one assigned let's go ahead and open that up and take a look inside and within here we're going to find a bunch of different folders that are all labeled after different emulated systems what we want to do here is create a backup for later use so we're going to go back to our downloads folder and then make a new folder and we're going to call this one ROMs with all caps from there we want to copy over all these folder from the G drive over to the ROMs folder within downloads and this will take a minute it's about 500 megabytes altogether because it has all the emulator cores within It Anyway once we've made that backup we're ready to do the next step of the process and that is to expand the FAT32 partition to take up all the extra space that we have in the SD card and this is a relatively easy process you just want to right click on it and then select resize partition and then move it all the way across it's going to give you a couple warnings here but then if you hit yes it should start right up and if all goes well it's going to extend the partition to take up the rest of the size of the SD card and if everything worked out okay we should be able to move on however I found about half the time it'll actually give you an error when you try to expand the partition the error is going to look like this it's going to talk about free clusters having issues if this happens to you no problem I'll show you how to fix this real quick what you actually want to do is delete this file partition so you'll hit delete here and then confirm and then select new Partition make sure it's at FAT32 and then change the name to ROMs after that go ahead and select save all up here on the top left and we're good to go however if you do make a new Partition like this you'll find that it's going to be blank inside and so this is where that backup of that ROMs folder is going to come in handy what you want to do here is go back to your downloads folder and then move all those folders back onto that new Partition so either way you need to expand that partition to take up the rest of the SD card and if you get an error that's the process to fix it and if all goes well when you go back to the G drive on your this PC you should be able to see that it takes up the entirety of the SD card 14 gigs for me okay we're actually getting pretty far in the process right now we're almost done with that first SD card next we want to go into the G drive then go into the CFW folder within there go into retroarch and you should find another retroarch folder here if you don't see this dot retroarc folder go in here and make sure that you have your hidden files enabled anyway once you're in there you're going to want to go into the system folder this is where we're going to put our bios files and these are system files that are required for specific emulators and this list here is the ones that I actually recommend that you put on this specific device and of course I'll have this all listed in the written guide in the link below now bios files are copyrighted so I can't share them specifically but you should be able to find them based on their name and really this is only a few of the BIOS files that'll actually work on certain systems what I recommend doing is I'll have a link in my written Guide to the onion OS emulators page and on this page they're going to have a bunch of different systems and most of these will work on garlic OS as well and within each of these systems it's going to show a listing of the BIOS files and so this is what I would recommend using to find any other bios files I don't have listed anyway all that's to say is that when you do add your bios files that's the folder you want to add them to the system folder on the first SD card and so after you've expanded your partition and you've added your bios files we're actually done with that first SD card we can start working on the games card or the second card next now we do need to use one tool if you are using a games card that's larger than 32 gigs and this tool is called GUI format or FAT32 format and of course this will also be linked in the written guide now this tool is going to allow us to format any card that's larger than 32 gigs to FAT32 which is required for this device so once you have it downloaded go ahead and open up the app here and then make sure you select the specific drive that's associated with the SD card that you're using for your games for me this is going to be the D drive and as you can see it's 128 gigs from there I recommend closing out any other window on your computer because it can often throw an error and then change the volume label to the word ROMs all caps from there just go ahead and press start and hit OK and you should be good to go so now we're almost ready to start moving over all of our games first we need to move all the folders over so the system knows where to look again we're going to go to that ROMs backup that we created in our downloads folder and then move all those folders onto the new SD card and now we're ready for the fun part which is to take your ROMs library and then find any of these folders here and then move your ROMs into the corresponding folder now much like with bios files ROM files are also copyrighted so I'm not going to say where to get them but once you do have them you'll want to move them into the folder like that and if you have any questions about which folder equates to which system I have all that Linked In the written guide as well anyway once you've moved over all of your game files we are ready to go so you can eject your SD cards and then insert them into the rg35xx and so let's go ahead and boot this up and as you can see it's now saying garlic OS and it takes a little bit under 10 seconds to boot from scratch and as I mentioned in the intro we have a recent section then favorites and consoles and retroarch you're likely going to spend most of your time in the console section this is where you're going to be able to navigate to each of your systems and then open up your games now thankfully it's only going to show the systems that you actually have games for inside so it's not going to be flooded with every single possible option anyway once you press a to select your system you can then go and open up a game we're going to start with Game Boy first now as I open it up I see a couple things off the bat number one we're getting the original Game Boy boot logo which means that the BIOS are loaded correctly Additionally you can see that it has a black and white colorization now luckily because garlic OS is based off of retchmark it's very easy to adjust this what we're going to do here is hold down the menu button and then press X to bring up your retroar quick menu from there we can scroll down to core options and then under GB colorization we can set this to internal then within the internal palette we can choose whatever color palette we would like now me personally I like the one called special one so that's what we're going to use from there I can back up and then select the resume button and there we go just like that we now have some nice offset green colorization however you may notice that the picture aspect ratio is 4x3 instead of the original Ten by nine so let's go ahead and fix that one next we're going to go back into the quick menu and then back out to settings and then video from there we'll select scaling and then within there there's an option that says keep aspect ratio we're going to toggle that on and then go back to the quick menu and then resume our game and so there we are now we have a nice green colorization as well as the proper 10x9 aspect ratio so if you're happy with that let's go ahead and save it we're going to press menu and X to get back to the menu then we're going to go down to overrides and then select save core overrides this means the aspect ratio is going to be persistent between both Game Boy and Game Boy Color now another neat trick you can do with garlic OS is that you can just press the L1 and R1 buttons to toggle between different colorization palettes and so if you'd like you can tap on one of those until you find one that you really like now let's talk about a couple other neat options we have within garlic OS number one if you're within a game you can just tap on the power button and it'll put it to sleep and this is actually even more than a proper sleep it actually does a quick shutdown of the system altogether so you won't have any battery drain now when you boot the system back up you just hold the power button for a few seconds and it'll actually go right back to your game now in order to exit a game and get back to the menu all you have to do is just quickly tap the menu button but I found that sometimes that won't exactly work and so instead I found that double tapping actually works better either way you should be able to tap or double tap while in a game to get right back to the menu and the nice thing here is it'll save your game when you close it out and it'll go right back to it when you start it back up either way that's super handy when it comes to a plug and play system like this and so now that we have an idea of how everything is set up let's go through these systems and talk a little bit about the expected performance that you can have at least with this most recent and built as you can see Game Boy Color is working fine and it has that proper 10x9 aspect ratio and same thing with gang gear this one works really well I also found that every Game Boy Advance game played at a full speed and you could also toggle it to have the proper 3x2 aspect ratio too I also found that all the 8-Bit and 16-bit systems played at full speed and they looked great so Nintendo Entertainment System looked great same thing with Sega Genesis Sega CD as well as Sega 32x sticking along those same lines things like turbo graphic 16 and turbographic CD also played at full speed no problem here and I should mention that if you press the menu and R2 button in any of these systems it'll work with a fast forward too now the speed of the fast forward will vary depending on what system you're playing but it's really handy tool if you're wanting to get through some of those cutscenes now I was a little bit worried about Super Nintendo emulation because it was pretty terrible on the stock operating system on the rd35xx but I'm happy to say that all the games that I tried played at full speed of course things like Mario World will play just fine same thing with Donkey Kong Country but some of the harder games to get at full speed like Final Fantasy VI as well as Mario World 2 Yoshi's Island played at full speed now I'm not quite sure which specific emulator core they were using right here and I'm sure this is not 100 accurate but still looks pretty good and plays great I was also pleasantly surprised to find that pico8 is working on garlic OS this is using the fake 08 core and many of the games work well some of the more heavy duty games like scrap boy and and poom didn't work correctly but other than that most of them did fine so I would say this is not a perfect Peak away console but most of the games will play pretty well now all told there were two systems that did present some performance problems for me with this latest build and according to Black serif this has to do with the fact that the hardware renderer is hidden behind a closed Source kernel that he doesn't have access to and so the first platform that had issues was arcade and so the arcade core that works the best is final burn Neil this one works really well with Capcom systems for example CPS one two and three play at full speed no problem and this core works really well with Neo Geo systems too and so if you are hoping to focus on Capcom and Neo Geo systems this will play just fine unfortunately I found that most of the other systems I tried that weren't those did not work properly so for example some of the other non-capcom beat-em-ups like X-Men or Simpsons did not play at full speed they had quite a bit of stuttering I also found that a lot of these Sega boards like for example Altered Beast also didn't play at full speed either and so unfortunately arcade is a mixed bag at least for now the other system that did present some problems for me was PlayStation one but I will say that for this system in particular Far and Away most of the games played at full speed and so as I did my typical emulation testing I only found two games that had persistent problems that was Tekken 3 as well as bloody Roar 2. [Music] foreign all the other games that I try to work just fine but if those two games in particular are very important to you then yeah PlayStation 1 is not perfect okay and a couple more observations before we start wrapping up number one when you go into the favorites section you'll see that they're listed in the order that you added them this confused me for a little bit just because it wasn't in alphabetical order and hopefully this gets fixed in the future the other thing is that the latest build as of making this recording does have the ability to add icons if you'd like and I have instructions on how to do this in my written guide below another note here is that if you have multiple systems that use the same core like Sega Genesis Sega CD and 32x you can actually just put them all in the same folder and it'll give it a much cleaner interface and so that's what I've done with my Sega systems as well as both my Turbo Graphics 16 and turbographic CD I just like doing it this way because it gives me fewer icons and gives it a cleaner look another thing to note here is the HDMI output of the rg350xx also works in garlic OS now there's a little bit of work that still needs to be done here for example it is outputting to a 16x9 aspect ratio which means that your games are going to look a little bit squished on top of that the audio is still coming out of the console and not the actual HDMI signal either way I still think it's pretty amazing that we even have this function working after only a few days of this operating system being available I think that shows a lot of promise for what we can expect in the future okay and finally because garlic OS has been getting a new update almost every single day for the past four days let's go ahead and talk about how to update the system and thankfully updating this is pretty darn easy what you want to do here is go back to the patreon post that we used before and then download the latest version of the other file the one that's called copy paste on top of stock once you have that downloaded go ahead and right click on it here and then open it with 7-Zip and then same thing here we're going to extract it to whatever folder you downloaded it to and so let's go ahead and delete that zip file we're not going to need it anymore and so this is what we're going to have to work with now here we're going to take that first SD card and put it back into our device and we're going to go into the other partition the one that's not named ROMs now there's going to be a folder called miscellaneous within those that we downloaded earlier what you want to do here is just drag these over to that other partition it's going to prompt you to replace the files and select yes you want to replace them next we want to go into that ROMs partition here and then we're going to go into the ROMs folder that we just downloaded and we're going to move all these folders over the others again it's going to ask you to replace the files and just select yes and then finally if you have a second SD card for your games you want to do the same process again move all those ROM folders over to that game folder and then everything will be good and thankfully this is not going to overwrite your games your bios files you'll be good to go anyway that's really about it for this video I wanted to show you a quick and easy way to update to garlic OS if you have the ambernik rg35xx now admittedly I would say this custom operating system is just a little bit rough around the edges at this point but again it's only been out for three or four days and so I'm amazed that we're this far already and I can't wait to see what comes later on and I think with garlic OS we're seeing a lot of potential in this budget based mini handheld I know there's a lot of people out there who are a little bit frustrated with not being able to get their hands on a miu mini and also there's a lot of people out there who would like something just a little bit bigger than that one anyway and I think now that we have a custom operating system on the rg35xx this one seems to be a pretty compelling buy it's got a nice screen decent battery life and good buttons and d-pad too when you combine that with garlic OS and the fact that it comes in at about 60 before shipping I think we got a real winner here for 2023. anyway let me know what you think in the comments below and as always thank you for watching 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: 394,696

Keywords:

Id: fStOsRyPe5Q

Length: 19min 31sec (1171 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2023