My dear nerds, you may not know it but this should be a happy day. We have good news! Well, actually I have good news, I'm just wasting your time with it. If you've been following me for some time, you know that I made a review of muOS at one point. In case you didn't see that video, MuOS is basically a custom firmware for a plethora of Anbernic devices, from the Anbernic RG35XX H, this guy right here, to the RG35XX Plus, to I'm pretty sure the 2024 version of the RG35XX as well, which quite frankly you shouldn't buy because the plus variant is better in every way, but I digress. Thing is, the guys at muOS did a monumental huge overhaul of a version, which they for some reason prefer to call beans. Yes, you heard that right, this huge version, which was supposed to be version 11, is called muOS Beans, as in, beans you eat. They even have a secondary team with literal beans. Don't ask me why, in a way it is kinda cute, it's weird but super cute. But thankfully that's not the official team and this custom firmware, this version of the custom firmware has so many jaw-droppingly good things to it, that we should give it a lot of attention. In fact, I'm gonna tell you this, right now muOS Beans is hands down my favorite custom firmware for this little guy. And it hasn't been that long ago since I praised the stock OS, I still have a good opinion on that, but I played with this custom firmware for the last 2 days or the last day and a half and I'm shocked, I'm utterly shocked. So stick around and watch this whole video because I'm gonna drop a lot of interesting things as I progress with this. But I'm not gonna be one of those watch time starved YouTubers, we all hate those people, I hate those guys, you hate those guys, there's no guys like this here. So here are the topics or the features that I'm gonna cover in this clip and I'm also gonna put video chapters but if you're one of those cool guys that love me, just grab a snack and relax and enjoy. Okay? Okay. Okay? Okay. Although you have to be a bit technical to care about this, is that muOS now fully switched to a 64-bit kernel. This means that the CPU inside supported handhelds like the Anbernic RG35XX H now gets to be used to its full potential. Many custom formers sit on a 32-bit kernel which don't really take advantage of everything that it can do. I just wanted to quickly gloss over this because I feel like people totally ignored this fact. And going into more details with this would require a video of its own, so I just wanted to highlight this a little bit. We shouldn't understate this, we minimize so many flipping things in our life, but actual standby in handheld is crucial. Your phone has actual standby, and just to put this in perspective, without actual standby, your phone's battery would die in a few hours as opposed to a day or a day and a half. Just know that your phone lasts up to two days because it goes into standby. Many custom firmwares (CFW) or even the stock OS on the Anbernic RG35XX H, RG35XX Plus, RG35XX 2024 edition, the original RG35XX, all of them do not have actual standby. The actual standby that you see on stock with these handhelds are nothing more than the handhelds turning the screen off and just browning in the background as they normally do. Well, because all these handhelds are based on Linux, the muOS muOS guys literally took the time to implement the actual standby that we would see on Linux laptops. So this means that whenever you press the button, now the handheld actually lives in a very low power state, meaning that you can feasibly keep it like this for many many hours without having battery anxiety. Yeah, it will still suck some battery per hour, but not nearly as much as you would see with other custom formulas or with the stock OS for that matter. The PPSSPP standalone emulator integration is well subject to personal preference. In muOS Beans, oh guys I'm gonna have to say beans so much in this video, anyway the guys that made this version of muOS actually integrated the standalone version of PPSSPP. So now any PSP performance that you can get out of whatever Anbernic handheld is supported will more or less be the same with what you get on the stock OS which also uses the dedicated PPSSPP. And this is notable because in the previous muOS version they actually used the retroarch core of PPSSPP which was famous for having a bit lower performance. So you know we lose a bit on cohesiveness but we gain a bit on performance. Some people might lean more on to this where they would just want things to have the same UX and same experience while others like me for example are more performance oriented and want to squeeze every little drop of performance from their handhelds. Look, muOS may not be known for a lot of things when it comes to the normie handheld users, but if there's one thing that muOS should be known for, is that it had immensely fast boot times. And I'm glad to say that it still does. Even though my subjective feeling is that they implemented a metric ton of features in version 11 as opposed to version 10, somehow we still managed to get that feeling that the custom firmware is snappy as all heck. And I like that, because I remember when Batocera first came out for this line of handhelds, people had to wait up to almost one minute for the flipping device to boot, which for me is nothing than an absolute joke. This shouldn't be the case. Look at this freaking thing, the value of a handheld is derived in its portability, in its capacity, and in its ability for it to be used as fast as possible in basically any environment that you can think of. Imagine the buzzkill if a handheld like this has immensely long boot times. Personally I would just sell it by that point, because personally I could never make peace with a tiny handheld device that isn't as fast as I need it to be. I would literally feel like I'm waiting in line. "Please sir, can you allow me to play a bit on you? Give me some dopamine please." It's been 5 hours, sir. No, that's bull cookies. We cannot have that. So I'm happy to say that MuOS is... well, version 10 seemed a bit faster, but version 11 still feels fast as all heck. And I like that about it. And this particular custom firmware has a lot of what I perceive as quality of life features. For example, one of the main things that I loved about the Miyoo Mini is the fact that it can instantly boot in the last game that I played. With no hassle, with not having me to use my brain, to overthink what's the last game that I played, where did I left off, what did I do. No, my brain could be in idle and I could sit there like a brain dead potato just not thinking about this, and the Miyoo Mini would just turn on and continue the game that I last left off right where I left off. And this was borderline magical, and muOS can more or less recreate this. It has the ability to boot into the last game that I played. And now I can honestly say that the one feature that made the Miyoo Mini Plus special to me can now be replicated on the Anbernic RG35XX H. Mind you, you can't do this on stock, as far as I know you can't do this on Batocera, and this is the only custom firmware that allows the hardware to behave in that specific way. Which quite frankly raises the bar and the usability of such a device, so freaking much my nerds. I can't even understate this, like this is borderline amazing. People at Anbernic should track the muOS team and hire them, because such features can make or break a device, no matter the hardware, no matter the design, no matter the engineering that you put in a handheld. All of those are secondary to how the device actually feels when you use it. And that's why I'm singing the praises of this freaking custom firmware. Anbernic would be so much lower on my priority list, if such custom firmware wouldn't exist. This next point is so freaking important my nerds and I am so excited by this that I'm gonna make a separate video on this a bit later, but MuOS has proper support for PortMaster. In case you don't know what PortMaster is, don't worry, don't worry, do not stress out, do not stress out, do not stress out. I think I'm overly caffeinated. I'm pretty sure I'm overly caffeinated. I started drinking coffee again. It's a whole different story. I'm not the biggest fan of caffeine because I literally hear a guitar riff after I drink a bit of caffeine, but anyway, I don't want to get too sidetracked. PortMaster is the most amazing thing that handhelds like the Anbernic RG35XX H can have. I don't want to spoil it too much because like I said I'm actually preparing a separate video but PortMaster basically allows you to play ported games from other platforms and by other platforms I mean mainly PC onto little handhelds like this. And fun fact, this little freaking handheld can play so much more than you ever think of. It can play Doom 3, yes, literally Doom. And I'm serious, Doom 3 can run on this little freaking device along with GTA 3, GTA Vice City, Return to Castle Wolfenstein which was one of my all time favorite games back when I was a kid in the early 2000s. All of these games run so freaking nice on the Anbernic RG35XX H and what makes this particular custom firmware, and of course I'm still talking about MuOS beans, is that they integrated a PortMaster app which allows you to basically download hundreds of ported games, not just these four that I highlighted. You can play things like World of Goo, the original Half-Life. And if you're brave enough to tinker, even Half-Life 2 can be played on this little thing. Can you imagine the universe in which we live when this is possible? But like I said my dear nerds, I'm gonna go down this rabbit hole specifically and I'm gonna push out a fully dedicated video on this for you guys because I think this is mind blowing. Imagine playing Doom 3 on this. My first PC in 2003 couldn't play Doom 3 properly. I got like 7 frames per second and now we have this piece of poop which I can put in my pocket and forget about which can do Doom 3. It's mind blowing. It literally is mind blowing. Stuff like this should blow our minds. This is our brain, okay? And our brain should be like... because of this fact. And if I managed to raise your interest on this, then good. I should've. Subscribe. Stick around. No, seriously, subscribe and stick around. The channel is super small and honestly every subscription just blows my mind that you guys like this silly content that I make. And I'm humbled that there's people listening to my craziness. It's unreal to me. But anyway, back to my last point. Bear in mind that muOS is not just the things that I'm highlighting in this clip. There's so many things that this crazy team did that I couldn't even cover them all. Make sure to join their Discord and to take a look at the changelog. There's a ton of things there in the changelog that I should ideally cover, but then this clip would drive me insane from all the editing, so I basically just covered the cliff notes. But the last thing that I personally love that they did is that they expanded the theme support for muOS. Again, for context, you should totally watch my previous clip on the previous version of muOS, but in case you don't have the patience, the main idea is that muOS looked very retroarch -like. And that had a charm of its own, but not all people really liked that. With proper theming support, you can now make muOS look like basically everything you want. If for some reason you're very nostalgic over how the original PSP looked, now you can more or less have a ripoff UI of that, or you can make it look like other CFWs (custom firmwares). For example, you can make it look like Batocera a bit, or even something that's totally unique and different. Basically, you now have a lot of freedom with how you want your handheld to look and behave, and this is something that you simply do not get on the stock rom, this is something that well objectively Batocera does best, but now you get a bit of taste of that, of that customization in muOS as well. And this can never be a bad thing, because people like different things. People like variety, people like things that other people hate, but you know what all people should like? This channel and subscribing to me, if you haven't subscribed, please be one of those unspoken superheroes in the world, and please subscribe, okay? There's a priority list. There's self-preservation, subscribing to Blood Nerd, things like love for one's family, liking my videos, giving up your seat on the bus for old ladies, leaving a comment, becoming a channel member, and then being nice with people around you and in the society. All of these are very important, but the one most important thing should be to subscribe, because I really love you, unlike those pesky relatives and family members and whoever else. Me and your dog, we both love you, but I will never love you more than your dog or your cat, so make sure you appreciate your pets. But anyway, I wouldn't be a good YouTuber if I wouldn't gloss over some of the defects that muOS still has. One of the main developers over there told me that they are actively working on. They are currently working on replacing the entire audio pipeline, which means that things like Bluetooth Audio and HDMI Audio don't work as intended. So if you really need Bluetooth or if you really use your Anbernic device while connected on a TV, then I'm afraid that muOS is currently not for you, but I would keep a very close eye on these guys because they tend to move very fast with this kind of stuff. And I'm actually quite impressed with how quickly they implemented a lot of things. And yeah, there had to be like a small gotcha at the end with this. But personally, for my current use case, I don't use neither of those. I do sometimes have moments when I want to feel like this handheld is a sort of a mini Steam Deck and I do sometimes connect it to my TV and try to play around with an external controller. But if I am, to be honest, most of the times our handhelds are used in the most common way possible, as in we just use them as normal handhelds without all of these fancy schmancy use cases. Yeah, it's nice to be able to expand on their functionality in so many different ways, but most of the time we simply don't. And I think we all know why. We all buy these handhelds thinking "Ah, I'm gonna use them in such exotic ways, I'm gonna use it on my big TV, I'm gonna play with my friends." You're not gonna play with your friends and you're not gonna use it on your TV. Hell, you will be lucky if you have a quarter of the time that you envisioned to actually play handhelds like these as is. This adulthood sucks and because life is unfortunately not as rosy and not as, well, idyllic as we would want it to be. The cold hard truth is that, and this is my personal opinion, do not hate me for this, this totally applies to me, this might or might not apply to you, but I think most of us buy handhelds like this one or this one, also spoiler, expect a review on this one quite soon. We buy them because we want to think that we will use and play them, but most of the time they are simply a fantasy that we have. We like the idea of having all of our retro gaming nostalgia encapsulated in such devices, but I'm willing to bet that a lot of us use them way less than we would want to. And that's so sad and that breaks my heart, I really hope that we do manage to play with them as we intended, because these things are like tiny capsules of happiness, and we should explore that happiness. I think that we should all do this a bit more, just go into our own brains and our own thoughts a bit, figure out what we want to do and just do that. You know what I'm gonna do right after this video? I'm gonna play some mother flipping SNES, because for some reason I started missing how I used to play some SNES games when I was a kiddo, and I'm 34 and I will love every second of it, and please do the same, my dear nerd. Very smart people, smarter people than you or me, well definitely me, I don't know about you, they are working on awesome custom firmware's, given to us for free and especially made for us to enjoy. So let's enjoy them, and let's try to be a bit happier than we actually are, because at the end of the story, by dear nerds, Entropy still does its thing, everything in the universe will cool down and matter as we know it will stop existing, so in the blimps of existence that we have, we might as well realize that the things that make us feel good, are the things that should have as much time attributed to them as we can. But anyway, I'm going on a very weird rant with this, if you're still around I really love you, I'm not saying this as some sort of YouTube spiel, no, I really think that people who watch my stupid content are people that are like-minded to me, and I would probably be friends with you in real life, because look at us connecting, we are two people that would love nerdy conversations like these, and you're amazing for it. So here's us, my dear friend, and my dear nerd, but also don't forget to subscribe, this channel is super small and I want us to grow it together, let's see where this freaking journey takes us. A bad pitch after my whole speech from earlier, but if you really like what I do consider becoming either a channel member or a Patreon, if you help the channel out through either of these methods you will have a rightful place on my wall of fame, which I feature in each and every video, and these people right here are the crème de la crème of society. These are the best people in the whole 8 billion plus pool of people that we have on this rotating rock, and I invite you to be one of these awesome guys as well. But anyway my dear nerds, I'm recording for 45 minutes straight, I'm gonna hate myself editing this, in case you stuck around for so long, it's been a pleasure talking to you my dear nerd, and see you in the next clip. Actual kisses because, well you stuck around for this long, bye.
