muOS - Comprehensive Install & Usage Guide - RG35XX Plus/H

this video will be an in-depth tutorial for muos also known as Mo OSS or moose a great custom firmware for all current models of the RG 35xx and any upcoming models that continue to use the same chipset I will be focusing on the plus and H versions but this information should still apply to other models I will cover how to install muos and the process for adding ROMs and box art followed by exploring its settings and features including Standalone emulators and portmaster towards the end of the video I will go over some recommended settings and advanced topics for things that might be considered more Niche some of the information I go over in this video will be on the MU OS website so please check there if you want a written reference to some of the things I go over okay let's get on with it I do want to take a moment to First clear up some misconceptions about muos one of them being something I stated in my last video that was incorrect I said that muos used a foundation of retro Arch to build off of I have also heard people say similar things like muos is a fork of retroarch this is incorrect mu os's front end has been built from the ground up the developer adul has created it to be minimal customizable fast and easy to use another misconception that I think comes from the previous one is that you need to know retro Arch to use mu OS now I believe that the more you know about retro Arch the better you are off with any firware that uses it which is most of them however this should not be thought of as a barrier of using muos mu OS is a relatively new firmware in this space and is improving rapidly the version that I'm going to be going over in this video is version 10 some of the things I go over will change with time but you can keep up to dat with the changes either on the website or by joining the muos Discord the community is one of the best aspects of muos as they are very active and welcoming the developer and the knowledgeable contributors are always helping people with any issues or questions while they are also very open and receptive to new features recommendations and ideas and I recommend joining the Discord if not only just to get notified for updates and changes all right with that out of the way let's get on with the install to download muos you will want to get it from the website muos dodev and I will have a link to it in the description once on the web page just click on the link for your device under releases on the Le hand side of the page both the plus and H models share a version and this does mean that the SD card will be interchangeable between these two devices you will need image flashing software Rufus is normally my go-to however this is only available for Windows computers Mac and Linux users can use bolina Atcher as that is also a good option so go ahead and download one of those if you need to you should not have to extract the zip file to flash mu OSS however if you do run into any issues you can extract it and then flash with the image file as with any of these handhelds it's recommended to use a brand name SD card such as Samsung or SanDisk instead of the stock SD card that comes with it as they are normally cheap unreliable and known to fail I'll post some links for some SD cards that I recommend in the description connect your SD card to your computer and remove anything from it that you do not want to lose as flashing it will wipe everything from the SD card open up your image flashing software select the MU OS image file select the drive and double check this is the correct drive and then go ahead and start the flash the time this takes will depend on the speed of your SD card and your SD card reader once it is complete you will eject your SD card place it into your device and then hold down the power button until the device turns on you will then be prompted to select your device model followed by selecting your time zone and setting the date and time after this Mo OS will now go through its installation and this can take up to 10 minutes so you will need to give it some time once it is done you will be taken to the main screen and that is all for the installation I will go over all of these options in a bit but first let's add some ROMs go ahead and power off the device something to note with Mo OS it's recommended to power down with the shutdown menu option as opposed to holding down the power button as that is more of like a hard shutdown I will first show the process of adding ROMs as if you were using a single SD card setup and then I will go over a two card setup with the device powered off remove the SD card connect it to your computer and you should see your SD card with two folders on it if for any reason your card does not show up you may need to assign a drive letter to the partition you can do this with the windows partition manager rightclick the Windows start menu and go to to Disk Management find your SD card and it should be the one with the most partitions look for the partition named ROMs right click on it select change Drive letter and paths then click add then make sure a letter is selected on the right and then click okay once this is assigned you should now be able to access the SD card from your file explorer the first folder on the SD card is mu OS this contains things like the BIOS folder retroarch settings your saves and States while ROMs is where you're going to be placing your game files as you can see in the ROMs folder there are already some folders here with some freeware games that you can choose to keep or delete muos handles the ROMs folder differently than other firmwares as it does not require your folders to be labeled in any specific way it allows you to name and sort or categorize your ROMs in the way you would like you can see that on display here with the default folders as there is a folder labeled Sega and inside that folder there are two subfolders each containing a different Sega system whether you are using your own ROM collection or the widely recommended tiny best set go collection you can just drag and drop all of the system folders into the ROMs folder on the SD card and it will work fine however I like the idea of using the extra Freedom we have to organize things a little better you could organize them by company as they have started here I like that idea and that's what I use but you could use more subfolders to get as creative as you want maybe you like the idea of organizing them by handheld and Home console but I'm curious to see what other people come up with so if you want to share what you did please let me know in the comments now to add your bios files you will you'll need to go to the muos folder open up bios and then add all of your bios files here if you're unsure which bios files you might need or if they need to be in folders or not you can check the lib retro documentation I will post a link to that and it will explain which bios files are needed for which core if you need to import your saves you will go to the muos folder then saves then files by default it will look for these save files in folders that are the same name as the retroarch core you are going to use if these saves are from different cores or you don't have your saves in folders you can come back here after having run a game with a core and it will make a folder for you then you can just drag your saves in there be aware that a lot of save states are not easily transferable between devices it's best just to save your game within the game and move them over as a file after you have your ROMs added eject your card put your SD card back into your device and then you can navigate to your games by using the explore content option from the main menu when you go to launch a ROM for the first time you will be prompted to select the console for that game followed by choosing a retroarch core or Standalone emulator when available when you make this Choice it saves it for all other games that share this folder so you only have to do this once per folder and not for each game there are too many cores for me to go through and recommend one for each system so if you are unsure of what to pick you can either just choose one at random see how it works and if you run into issues you can always change it by hitting the select button while in the games browser and then trying a different one you can also search online for the different options and see what other people recommend if you are still unsure just ask in the comments below and be sure to mention what system and game you are trying to play and I or someone from the community will probably give you a recommendation if you want to run some games from the same system on a different core the easiest way to do this currently is just to make a subfolder put the games in there and you'll be prompted again for what quarter run for those games the developer adul has stated that in the future there will be an option added to the UI to set a core for a specific game now if you want to use a second SD card it is fairly easy make sure there is nothing you care about losing on your card and then you will need to format your SD card to either fat 32 or X fat I recommend using X fat you can do this many ways but if you're on Windows I like to use Rufus or if you're on Mac you can use the built-in dis utility and I will have some instructions Linked In the description for Mac users in rofus you select the SD card set the boot selection to non- bootable and then change the file system to xat and then hit start once you have formatted the SD card just create a folder named ROMs then drag your ROM systems folder in here you can then eject the card place it in the device and as you can see When selecting explore content you will be given the choice to select which SD card to browse for multi-disk games with most firmwares it's recommended to use CHD files with m3u files pointing to them this prevents duplicates from showing up on your system there is an extra step for muos that must be taken to avoid the duplicates issue you will need to have your CHD files in separate folders and have those folders hidden from muos by putting a DOT at the start of the folder name this way muos only sees the m3u files and ignores the CHD files now when I saw this I did not want to go through all of my folders and m3u files and add dots to everything so I wrote a batch script to speed this up I will link to my GitHub where I have posted two batch scripts I wrote for Mu OSS that can make this process a lot easier I also have a script there for people who have yet to convert their their CD disc games into CHD format if you want to see me do a walkthrough of the process of using these scripts for CHD conversion or the m3u script for muos the section will be in the advanced part of this video when you need to switch discs in game you can open the retroarch menu go to disk control select eject disk use the left and right on the d-pad to select the new dis number the select insert dis and that's it here are some of the default mu OS hot Keys when you are in the front end or while playing games using retro Arch if you want to change some of these specifically the Retro Arch ones here's how you go about doing that select retro Arch from the main menu go to settings input hot Keys keep hotkey enabl set to button 11 as this is the menu button and is required to be pressed in combination with any of the other hotkeys listed here for the action to trigger I recommend at least setting a button for quit as this will allow you to quickly close out of a game instead of having to quit from the Retro Arch menu I set mine to the select button so when I hit menu plus select the game will close out another change I make is swamping these save and load State buttons because the way I remember which is which is L stands for load but you can set them however you would like once you are done making your changes we will need to save these changes by backing out to the retroarch main menu and then selecting configuration file then select save current configuration currently there is not a box art scraper built into mu s but this is something that is being worked on in the meantime it is pretty easy to add artwork and I will go over that process now first you will need some artwork to add you can get that artwork in multiple ways one of those being scraper I will not be covering how to use scraper in this video as there are already lots of guides on how to do that but I will link to a few guides in the description one of them being a video I made that also shows some other ways of getting box art here's an example of the results of one of my favorite ways that I show in that video where I use steamr manager to Source the art if you plan on using scraper an active Community member and contributing developer antic has created some mixes to be used for Mo OSS I will link to his GitHub in the description and for people using tiny best set go antic has already scraped the artwork for that set and it can be downloaded from the same GitHub okay so once you have your box art we you will need to place it on the main SD card so go ahead and connect to your SD card navigate to the MU OS folder info catalog here you will see each system name and inside each folder there will be a box preview and text folder the Box folder is where you want to put the box art and the image file names will need to match the names of the ROMs that they are associated with the preview and text folders are for the menu that comes up when you press the menu button from the ROM browser if you are going to use antic tiny best set artwork the easiest way to do that is to go to releases on his GitHub download the TBS zip file after extracting it you will want to open up the folders until you get to muos here then you can just drag this mu OS folder onto your main SD card you may experience a random issue where the artwork loads a little oddly overlapping but just momentarily this is a known issue and it has been reported that it will be fixed in the next version of muos now for an overview of the UI and menus at the top right of the screen you have the icons for Bluetooth has not been implemented so you can go ahead and ignore that icon Wi-Fi stays gray even when it is connected currently battery level followed by the clock at the bottom of the screen you will see a visual guide of what your options are for that current menu when you see the little three dots icon that is indicating hitting the menu button now for the menu options explore content you already know this is where you browse your ROMs and launch games favorites is a list that you can add games to by navigating to the game you want to add and hitting y on the favorites menu list they can be launched or removed removed by hitting X history shows your recently played games you can launch them from here or remove them by hitting X the information section has a few things first is the activity tracker as of right now this feature is still in development but when finished it will show you how many times you have played a game and the total game played time input tester is where you can go to make sure all of your inputs are being registered system details will show you the current version of mu and other system specs including the percentage of your battery charge and then credits show a list of the developers and contributors in the configuration menu we have general settings launcher sound enables or disables the frontend background music or navigation sounds enable HDMI when this is turned on the device will automatically switch the display over to the HDMI connected device when you plug in the HDMI cable device startup let you choose what happens when the device boots up the choices being main launcher which is the default starting you at the main menu the favorites menu or you can have it auto launch the last played game screenshot storage let you choose which SD card to store their screenshots idle blank and idle shutdown are not working for the plus and H models at the moment but this would set the time for when sleep or sh shut down is triggered low battery indicator is planned to be working in version 11 and will Flash the screen on and off once when you hit the threshold that you set night mode puts a heavy blue light filter on the screen that also stays active during gaml most things in the advanced settings can be ignored for now as a lot of it is being worked on and some things are being removed interface font type is the one thing to point out as this allows you to override the theme font with a soft or hard pixel font theme manager is where you can change the theme of the front end you can find more to download on the Discord to install them you just drag the theme zip folder that you downloaded into the themes folder located on the main SD card in mu OSS info themes Wi-Fi network is where you connect connect to your Wi-Fi as of right now you will have to type in the name of your Wi-Fi network but soon there will be an SSID search feature added web services features require you to be connected to Wi-Fi and I will go over these into more detail in the advance section and then date and time is self-explanatory device type allows you to set which device you have and then it relays this information over to portmaster so that way it knows if your device has analog sticks or when it's setting its controls system refresh has a lot of self-explanatory scripts which will help you either clear out lists or restore settings to default when needed if you have any questions about these please ask in the comments portmaster comes pre-installed and already working I will go over this more in the portmaster section of this video the Retro Arch option opens retro Arch where you can make changes to the general config that affects all systems and games unless you have an override in place and the last two options are obvious reboot or shut down the system now onto the Standalone emulators the first the DraStic emulator is already set up and ready to use with Nintendo DS games you just have to add your NDS ROMs and then select the DraStic core when launching them here are some hot keys for the DraStic system one thing to note is that if you have the H model the anal log stick is already set to use for moving the stylus and selecting by clicking it in the Standalone version of PCO 8 is supported with splore in order to use this you will need to have purchased the full version of Pico 8 then you will need to download the Raspberry Pi version of PCO 8 on your SD card navigate to Mu OS emulator Pico 8 then place these two files Pico 8 Dy y n pico8 d a from the zip file into this folder you will then want to navigate to your ROMs folder make a Pico 8 ROMs folder if you don't have one then create a text file and rename it explore. p8 with a capital S you can then eject your SD card connect it back to your device before launching splore make sure your Wi-Fi is connected you can then navigate to the Explorer File launch it and select picco 8 then choose Pico 8 external and you're all set you can launch the explore file to get in if you need to get back to the front end you can press Start while hovering over a game in splore open up options and then select shut down Pico 8 the same goes for if you're in a game Press Start open options shut down Pico 8 the last Standalone I'm going to go over is the experimental scum VM this is available alongside the Retro Arch core in order to install games for scum VM you will need to create a folder in your ROMs folder on the SD card you can name it whatever you'd like inside that folder you will need to create another folder and name it the title of the game that you were trying to add and then you will place a DOT at the front of that title here you will be placing all of the required data files for that game into this folder you will then create a text file next to that folder and rename it to the title of the game that you are adding it should be game tile. scvm a note here you do not add the dot to the front of this file then you will edit the file that we just created and you will need to add the full game ID in order to find out what the full game ID or what data files are required for your game you will want to check the scum VM compatibility page and I will have a link to that in the description MOS comes with portmaster pre-installed and ready to use is a simple tool that is set up to easily install ports for Linux handhelds like this one as of right now it is restricted to arm HF ports so no stardo Valley yet after launching portmaster you can go to the ready to run ports and see a list of ports that do not need any additional files you can just select them install it and then once installed they will be added to your ports folder on your SD card and you can launch them like you would any other game you can also browse the full list by going to all ports here you will find some games that will require extra files to be added after installing them from Port Master when you select more info on a game you will see instructions on the right hand side that should tell you what files are needed and where they should be placed while playing a portmaster game you can close out of it by pressing start and select at the same time for more information you can go to the portmaster website at portmaster . games I will link to that in the description you can also go to the portmaster Discord the performance of mu os's front end itself is great it starts up quickly in about 5 to 6 seconds and it's Snappy to navigate I tested the battery life and it lasted 9 hours at half brightness using headphones playing PS1 games I have not noticed any issues with game performance from PS1 and lower as I would not expect there to be something to note for PS games specifically enhanced resolution is on by default and it will make some games look better but it can cause issues with others if you notice any issues like I did with Final Fantasy 7 here you can disable enhanced resolution by bringing up the retroarch menu going to core options disabling enhanced resolution and enhanced resolution speed hack if you want to dis able this just for the game you are currently running you can then select manage core options at the top and choose save game options Dreamcast performance seems to be about on par with the stock firmware for the games that I have been [Music] testing n 64 performance seems to be about the same also [Music] that is you do have to make sure to set the gfx plugin to race but this may be different depending on the games that you play PSP is limited to the Retro Arch core as the Standalone emulator PPSSPP has not been added yet however that is something being worked on so PSP is where I feel like you would be taking a noticeable hit to Performance but but as I said in my other review I don't think this is the best device if you're trying to play PSP games anyway so it's really not a dealbreaker for me now I'm going to cover some of the advanced or Niche topics I know some people like the idea of having a device that they can power off it Autos saves the state and then when they power it back on it boots right back into the game and autol loads the state this is great for people who like to play one game at a time here are the settings to achieve the closest thing to that from the main menu go to configuration general settings set device startup to last game played then back out to the main menu and go to Retro Arch settings saving and make sure auto save State and autoload State are set to on back out once go to input then hot keys and make sure you have a button assigned to quit I have mine set to select now back out to the retroarch main menu select configuration file and select save current configuration close out of retro Arch now go start up a game and you will notice that it autol loads up your last state if you have one so now let's say you are done playing your game you will hold the menu button and then hit the button you set for quit which is Select for me the game will close out and save the state you can then just hit B until you get to the main menu hit up once on the d-and and then hit a to shut off the device then the next time you power it on it will take you back to the game and autoload the state now this setup is not for everyone but I know some people will like it before I get into the scripts I wrote I don't claim to be a batch file wizard I don't recommend that you run these on the only copies of your games either make a backup copy or run them on the SD card themselves and delete the scripts from the SD card when finished if anyone runs into issues or has recommendations on improving the code please let me know on my GitHub I will start off with people who do not have CHD files for their CD disc games to conver convert your games to chds first go to my GitHub page that I have linked and download both the CHD man.exe and the convert to CHD bad file you can do this by clicking on the files in the top of the page and then clicking on the download raw file button in the top right you will then need to place these two files in a folder together with all the games that you want converted one one thing to note is that if you're using this for Dreamcast games they have to be in the format of GDI and not ISO files as when converted from ISO to CHD can cause issues with some emulators this will convert all games located in the same folder and all subfolders then when it is done it will delete all q and ISO files and everything that I converted from if you do not want this script to delete the files when finished you can edit the file and remove this whole line and then save it when ready run the convert to CHD bad file and this will take some time depending on how many games you're converting once this is done all your games should be in the CHD format now for the next part we're going to do the M3 U file creation to create the m3u files needed for Mu OS go to my GitHub page I have linked and download the m3u Creator file by clicking on the file at the top the page and clicking on the download raw file button in the top right before you run this script it's required that all of your games are in CHD format and that they are all in separate folders because this is specifically for muos I recommend running the script directly on the SD card here I place the M3 U Creator in the PlayStation folder and then when I run it you can see it create all the m3u files and then it also adds a DOT to all the folders to hide them from mu OS to prevent from seeing the duplicates when done you can delete the batch file if for any reason you need to undo this you can download the revert muos m3u creator file on my GitHub and run it the same way you have ran this one now for the web services shell access and virtual terminal are not things I will be covering in this video however if you know how to use them the username and password are both root all lowercase you can use file browser to connect to your SD card from a web browser that's on the same network by typing the IP address of the device followed by colon 9090 sync thing can be enabled and then accessed from a web browser by typing in the IP address of the device followed by colon 7070 I will have a link in the description for a guide on how to set up sync thing if you would like to be able to have your save games synced with other devices that also run sync thing Network time sync enables your clock to to be synced over Wi-Fi as I close out this video I'm going to show off some footage of a test build from the upcoming MOS version 11 update and some of the themes people have already made for it muos has become one of my favorite custom firmwares and I look forward to it only improving over time I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the development and a special thanks to Antics and out oful for answering all my questions if you enjoyed this video please give it a like And subscribe for more content like this if you have any questions comments or tips for others please leave them in the comments below and as always thank you for [Music] watching

Channel: Phyrex Techs

Views: 29,398

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Id: Do_bJWNez4k

Length: 33min 58sec (2038 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2024