A great entry into the retro handheld segment. Great performance. Great screen. I mostly play PS1 games and the thumbsticks make it that little bit better. 64GB MicroSD card included.
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@Adster01: Nice - to change the theme in the menu for the default loaded themes - its just Start button->UI Settings->Theme
Mine arrived today. Definitely not the most premium feeling device. The protective plastic on the screen looks like it's taken some abuse (though the actual screen itself seems to be fine) and I could hear the start-select buttons rattling around before I even opened the box. Can't complain for the price though.
Mine was delivered yesterday, what an awesome device for the price.
For anyone who would like a guide on how to set it up from scratch with the latest Ark OS, this is the process I'm following:
Replace the SD cards asap. I got a 32GB Sandisk MicroSD from Officeworks (currently $9) for the OS, and a 256GB Samsung for the ROMS (found one on Amazon for $36)
I got a 256GB one as I want to get the full Tiny Best Set collection, and want to add a lot more Portmaster games down the line.
From what I've read, only Samsung microSDs work correctly in the ROM card slot. Don't go for any other brand.
I used the latest ArkOS image which has been nicely configured by the OP here (12-22-2023-R36s-ArkOS Image):
https://www.reddit.com/r/SBCGaming/comments/18kztju/r36s_ark…
This video shows you all you need to get the image loaded onto the OS card. If you use the latest image above, you shouldn't have any issues:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1MQZVG8Dy8
Once it's setup with the OS image, you can start putting ROMs in. I used the Tiny Best Set GO! set shown in the video.
I also copied off the N64 ROMs that came with the device, and put them into the new ROM SD.
When I was happy with the ROMs, I followed this to get familiar with ArkOS and to customise some settings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48nDciXdn_g
I'm now in the process of scraping box art etc for the games. I'm following this to do it on my PC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBQuFBbRsXs
Great guide. Thank you.
Yep for the money I'm super impressed with this thing and will be buying a couple more for my kids instead of Switches…!
After loading a heap of roms and scraping them, I'm now getting a lot of ports onto it, including Super Mario 64 (which is flawless), Zelda 3, wipeout, Blood/Doom/Duke Nukem/Marathon/Shadow Warrior/Half-Life (!) Sonic 1, 2, 3, AM2r, Prince of Persia, TMNT Shredders Revenge, Revolt and so on. Refer to https://portmaster.games/games.html
To be fair this is a rather complicated thing to do and varies from game to game as to what is needed, so not for the faint of heart. The documentation is pretty light also.
Now I really want the Ship of Harkinian (Ocarina of Time) port to come out as that would be fantastic!
Lastly, don't forget to try a bunch of Pico-8 games… here is a good place to start getting them from: https://nerdyteachers.com/PICO-8/Games/Top200/
Pico-8 games are a piece of cake to get running. Just save the png files (yep thats all!) into the pico-8/carts/ folder
It's a great system but some PS1 games are unplayable because of the shape of the body.
Eg. Trying to strafe in shooters with the shoulder buttons will give you the worst hand cramps.
Agreed, the size is pretty cramped for adults in terms of the controls. My biggest complaint at this point is the noise of the buttons (particularly the shoulder/triggers). I'm probably going to loosen up the D-Pad also in the coming days just to see if that improves it a little.
I've also found just plugging in a normal USB-C dongle has worked fine in terms of LAN cable connection. No need for OTG cable.
Lastly, when I first received my unit it charged fine with a generic 3-in-1 cable I had laying around, but now it doesn't, so I have to use the cable it came with.
Oddly, even with the unit plugged in, it appears to drain battery whilst on - but this could perhaps just be shoddy, cheap battery management hardware, that doesn't quite know when the battery is 100% charged, which when you turn it off, lets it charge for a while regardless just to ensure it is topped up.
Make sure you're not using a fast charger. Needs to be a 5v 2a maximum I believe.
Try 3d printing the grip i posted on thingiverse.
Got mine last week, worked fine then I noted 1 dead pixel thought no biggie still great for the price. Designed/remixed a 3d printed grip and started enjoying it. Today I thought hmm let's flash stock arkos. After fiddling around and figuring out to replace dtb files, the screen on my unit started flickering.
May be I never noted before as Mostly played at night with very low brightness but the new OS had it turned up high. So my conclusion is you get what you pay for, there is obviously no quality control, screen is unusable in daylight with higher brightness due to massive flickering. At 1 to 10 % brightness it's usable indoors with low ambient light
but the new OS had it turned up high
Just go back to the old one?
https://www.reddit.com/r/SBCGaming/comments/18kztju/r36s_ark…
Nope, like I said in my comment above, my unit was probably faulty on arrival, but because I never had it on high brightness didn't realised it was an issue. Any how, it's a bedside console now so only have one purpose to play games at ultra low brightness until it lasts. I don't have high hopes on longevity of r36s. On the flipside my rk2020 from 2020 still works without many issues.
@Adster01: It should be the same? - do you mean the theme - you can change & download more through options->tools->theme master.