PowKiddy RGB30 D-Pad Fix, Rumble Motors, Face Button Swap & ArkOS Install guide | Mod tutorial

let's mod the pow Kitty rgb3 in four different ways or maybe you consider this three different ways because the first mod we're going to do is to install the ark operating system some people in general prefer Ark over jealous but it's really preferential in my opinion Arc does have some really good optimized defaults compared to jealous but I think jealous is a little easier to work with however aross is required for one of the later mods so we'll go ahead and install it here the second mod will be the long awaited dpack fix this will basically make the d-pad a little more accurate and stop you from hitting all those accidental diagonals you're going to need some Captain tape for this particular mod the third mod will be to switch out the existing face buttons with some custom ones and I'm going to use these beautiful ones from Sakura retro modding there's a link to these in the description box below if you're interested but this guide will work the same for any custom face button and finally we'll be adding vibration or Rumble Motors to this device with this setup supported games like Pokémon pinball on Game Boy or any number of dual shock enabled PlayStation 1 games will cause the device to rumble it's not a particularly difficult mod but you are going to need a soldering iron and the associated tools at minimum you're going to need to solder on two wires but if you want a dual motor setup you'll probably need to do some splicing as well but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it for now let's go ahead and Jump Right In with the Aros install now you have a couple of options here if you want to you can buy a second SD card and swap between Aros and jealous whenever you want by simply swapping out the left side SD card or you can completely overwrite your existing gelous operating system on your existing SD card either way works fine however note that if you're only using one SD card meaning you don't have a second SD card for ROMs you're going to want to back up your ROMs and bios and saves before you wipe out the original card if you do have a secondary SD card that contains your ROMs then you don't need to do anything you can actually hot swap between jellis and Ros whenever ever you want simply by replacing the left side SD card the process here is the same regardless of which method you want to use and it's really really easy first we'll browse to the Aros GitHub and then scroll down the page until we find the download links for the rgb3 specific build this is going to download an archive file after extracting that archive you'll have a image file and all we need to do is to write this to either the existing or the new SD card on Windows you can use something like win32 dis imager just select the correct SD card then browse to the image file and then click right if you're on Linux or Mac you can use DD but I recommend against using belena eter in any case because it does cause some problems if you're on Windows you may be prompted to format the SD card after the writing is complete but absolutely don't do this just eject the SD card and reinsert it into your device power the device on and wait quite a long time until it goes into the emulation station home screen this will take anywhere from around 5 to 15 minutes and your device will reboot several times in the process so just leave it alone until it's on this home screen and once you're on the screen you can go ahead and activate your second SD card for ROMs go to the options section and then select Advanced scroll down to the bottom and you'll find switch to sd2 for ROMs select that option and then wait a few minutes while it processes until you're back on the emulation Station menu and now all of your systems and ROMs will be visible and that's it for the operating system install now we're ready to go ahead and crack the rgb3 open for the rest of the mods starting with the d-pad mod power off your device and then remove the SD cards noting that I forgot to do this originally in my footage make sure to remember which SD card is which as well something you should definitely do for this entire process which I didn't do in this footage is to lay your rgb3 face down on a soft microfiber cloth doing so will avoid any damage or scratches to the screen or analog sticks anyway unscrew the four philli screws on the back and then use a spudger to gently remove the Clips around the edges of the device this shouldn't be too difficult and I recommend to go in from the top in the middle first and then move along to the shoulders and then down the edges and around the bottom of the device you shouldn't need too much force for this and eventually the back should just pop off a good word of advice here is to never use excessive force it should never take too much to open this device once the back Clips have been removed you don't want to pull the case completely off because there are five cables that you don't want to rip the first thing you want to do is to remove the battery connector just wiggle it free from its slot until it comes loose and try to avoid putting excessive pulling force on the wires themselves next do the same thing to remove the speakers and then the black antenna cable should just pop right off now you can place the back cover aside somewhere safe and out of the way especially because the battery is exposed so here we have the inside of the rgb3 and there are seven screws here that we need to unscrew that are holding the motherboard down just remove these one by one keeping them separate from the four other screws we removed earlier CU you definitely don't want to screw the wrong screw into the wrong place when we put it back together now release the clips for the analog sticks and gently pull the ribbon cables out then release the clip for the display Cable in the middle and gently move that out as well I recommend against using any kind of metal tool to handle these ribbon cables because you risk ripping or piercing them so just be careful if you can use your fingers that's best then you should just be able to gently lift the motherboard away from the case if you know I actually forgot to remove the display cable until this point and another word of advice here is if something feels like it's pulling or keeping the board down you've probably forgot a screw or a cable somewhere so just double check again excessive force is never needed turn it over and we'll take a look at the d-pad contact as you can see I've actually already had this mod installed which is this yellow tape in the center it's simply a square of Captain tape covering the bottom halves of the contact with this mod it lessens accidental diagonals and makes the d-pad a little bit more accurate when you roll it around it also doesn't change the overall feeling of the d-pad either now my installation here does work pretty great except that the up direction is a little stiff so we'll go ahead and redo this together now after measuring the distances between the contacts I found that I would need around a 16 mm square piece of tape my original install was 16.5 square but I recommend going with 16 it seems to be a bit better and since I did this mod again it's been perfect for me if you find narrow Captain tape you can use two pieces of it in a cross shape or if you have wide tape like mine you want to cut it into a square by the way this really doesn't have to be completely perfect to substantially improve the d-pad so don't stress about it too much I cut a piece of tape and set it stupidly on my heat proof soldering mat then I squared off the edge measured 16 mm and cut down the tape then I turned at 90° measured 16 mm again and cut it again right through the mat oh well I then Ed tweezers to remove the cut square of tape because this is really thin and hard to detach also you want want to handle the sticky side of the tape as little as possible because it does lose stickiness fast with your hand oils and now what we need to do is to stick this tape as close to the center as possible make sure to get a fairly precise fit with the tape evenly covering the bottoms of each of the pads upon reviewing my footage here I have no idea why I thought my installation was good it's super uneven on the top and on the bottom but since I've done this it has worked great so I guess you don't need to be perfectly accurate you might want to try this multiple times however to actually test this you need to reassemble the entire device either way if you're removing the tape multiple times and using metal tweezers be very very careful not to scrape the motherboard so that's the d-pad mod done but I do have a couple of notes for you here what you should actually do is to cut the corners off of your captain tape and that's because the corners are generally the first area that would peel up it usually doesn't happen with Captain tape though it sticks down very securely my second note is that you can technically use electrical tape for this mod as well however due to the thickness and the rubbery material it is going to change how the d-pad itself feels also electrical tape has a tendency to shrink and peel over time so Captain tape is definitely my recommendation and finally if this seems too hard to shape and cut yourself you can buy pre-made cuts on Etsy personally I don't think that's really worth it for just a few minutes of patience but you can order one if you want I'll leave a link to an Etsy shop in the description box below if you want to do that and so if you were just here for the d-pad mod you can now go ahead and re assemble your device but I have a couple more mods to do here starting with the modded face buttons I have these gorgeous fantastic Sakura retro modding PlayStation buttons and these are so much better than stock it's kind of ridiculous not only do they look fantastic but they also have a dome shape which makes it much much easier to slide your fingers between the different buttons they're so comfortable and just amazing I love them I'll leave a link to these in the description box below and know I did purchase these with my own money and this video isn't sponsored or anything anyway install the in these is super easy grab the front shell of the device pull off the right side membrane and then pop out the old buttons then you just need to pop the new ones in depending on the types of buttons you get you might need to ensure that they're in the right way especially the triangle button in this case once you have them all installed reseat the membrane pushing it over the four pillows then hold your finger on the center of the membrane and lift the device whilst holding the membrane push the buttons in gently to make sure they're not getting stuck or aren't too stiff when I did this the square button was kind of stiff so I took it out accidentally dropped it and put it back in and then it was fine note that you won't be able to fully know what these are going to feel like until you've screwed the motherboard back down so you might want to do that just to check the buttons and if this is all you're doing you can now reassemble your device but I'm personally going to go for the big mod adding the vibration or Rumble Motors I want to say a big thanks to my friend Game Boy jint for showing me this mod and the Aros Developers for fully documenting it on their Wiki which you should definitely check out so here's what you're going to need for for this mod first the motors you'll need to get some 10x 3.4 mm size 1.5v to 3v DC coin button type Motors I bought a pack of five of these on Amazon for $4.99 I'll leave a link in the description box below for UK and US viewers in case you want to buy some you'll then of course need a soldering iron and the associated equipment such as solder flux alcohol or PCB cleaner a set of Helping Hands Etc optionally if you want to install both Motors you'll need some additional wire and wire strippers some straight Cutters are recommended as well on the back side of the board you'll see a big white circle and just above that you'll see two pads marked with Moto these are the connections for the motor and the white circle is where the motor itself goes and we're going to start by just adding one motor according to the Aros Wiki it's a good idea to test your motors with a battery first but I didn't bother the blue or black wire from the motor itself should go on the bottom pad Which is closest to the white circle and the red wire Will Go On on the upper pad I'm going to start by adding some additional solder to the pads I'm adding a little bit of flux which helps the solder to flow and gives you a nice clean soldering job now I'm just going to add a little bit of solder to the pads to make some bigger blobs next I'll tin the wires of the motor for this I'm just using a set of Helping Hands to Hold the wires and then I'm coating the exposed wire with just a tiny bit of solder it will melt directly into the wire and will help us get a better connection we do need to do this quickly because the shielding on the motor's wire is when remot pretty quick now I'm just going to solder those wires onto the pads now I'm not great at soldering but I do this by just heating the pad first then melting the wire into the existing solder it's easiest to do the blue wire first and then the red wire and yeah that's pretty easy overall and by adding those bigger blobs first we get a nice solid connection once these are soldered on try not to move the motor around too much or you risk breaking the wires or ripping the pads off of the board these motors come with adesive pre-installed so I'm going to pull off the white cover using my tweezers and then stick it down toward the center of that white circle and that's actually it for this mod the rumble motor should now work perfectly and at this point if you only want to use one motor which is itself an excellent solution you just need to clean up the remaining flux with some isopropyl alcohol or PCB cleaner and then reassemble your device there's a time stamp for enabling The Rumble in Aros for you to skip to if you want to do that however let's go ahead and add the second motor for double the fun for this we'll need to extend the motor wires I'll start by cutting some lengths longer than necessary then stripping the ends and tinning them now we need to solder these wires to the second Rumble motor to extend them and yeah I so sorry for this complete botch job I held the wires together twisting them as much as I could together and then just did what I had to do to solder them give me a like a comment and a subscribe if this is the worst wire splicing job you've ever seen but it did actually work so whatever now we need to Shield the wire I'm using some heat shrink but you could just wrap it in electrical tape if that's easier for you we want to stick the motor into the empty space on the other side of the board however note that I didn't stick the motor down just yet because I don't want to put any unnecessary tension on the wires now I'm going to roughly cut the wires to length based on that position it's okay for them to be a little bit longer than needed next I'll strip the wires and Tin them and my advice here is to strip a lot tin a lot and then clip them down to a small length using clippers then we'll just solder them into the same pads as before with the other wires and that's it we just need to stick the motor down and then stick the wires down with a little Captain tape and we're done to be honest when I was recording this I was in a real hurry so my tape was rushed we just don't want the wires to be moving around too much inside I also forgot to clean the excess flux off of the pads which is something you definitely want to do this stuff will very slowly but very surely eat through your PCB so I had to take mine apart again and clean it but I didn't record that so that's four mods complete let's go ahead and reassemble the device reinsert the volume power and reset buttons then lower the motherboard down toward the case ensuring that the display cable goes through its slot and that the analog stick cables are up above the motherboard then just gently lay the motherboard down into place check the ports to ensure the board is seated correctly then reconnect to the analog sticks and the display cable screw the board back down reinsert the shoulder buttons but ensure that they're the right way around I got mine wrong so I had to redo them with the back cover reconnect the antenna then the speakers and finally the battery always do the battery last push the cover back on but don't put on those four screws just yet first we want to power the device on and make sure there aren't any issues initially my device turned on but nothing came up on the screen I took it apart and receded the display cable but it still didn't work after quite a long time troubleshooting I realized I had forgotten to put the SD cards back in anyway with the SD cards reinserted the operating system booted right up and everything seems to be working fine if you didn't install the rumble Motors you can go ahead and screw the back four screws in and you're done but if you did we can enable Rumble in the operating system to enable it press start and go to advanced settings and then go to the bottom and enable optional Rumble motor I'm going to test this in Pokémon pinball to begin with and it works absolutely great the rumble is pretty subtle and it feels fantastic and adds a great tactile feeling to this game and I can confirm that it did come through on both sides thanks to the dual motor setup for PS1 we need to change some further settings when you're in game open the retroach menu then go to controls device type and set it to dual shock in core options input ensure that Rumble is enabled and then in your particular game you might need to go into the option setting and enable vibration once you verified the rumble is working you can save the core overrides to make sure that those settings apply to all games however bear in mind that you may need to enable it in each individual game's options menu and that's it four incredible mods okay fine maybe three incredible mods for your power Kitty rgb3 I honestly can't believe that this device just keeps getting better and better and better I adored it out of the box but the improved d-pad the better face buttons and the vibration motor just take it to a whole new level if you perform any of these mods let me know how it goes in the comment box below and be sure to let me know if you have any questions about it as well if you enjoyed this video please go ahead and leave a like on it subscribe to retro breze for more content just like this and share on your social media channels as well and I think that's about this one done so thank you very much for watching retr breze and I look forward to seeing you again next time

Channel: RetroBreeze

Views: 20,091

Keywords: retro, retro handhelds, retro gaming, retro games, powkiddy, rgb30, rgb20s

Id: aJVWMhnDgM0

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 03 2023