I recently bought a R36S handheld emulation device from AliExpress. There exist a lot of different information about these neat little handhelds online, and there are many users on Facebook / Reddit / various forums that have questions about specific setups. The R36S often come with a memory card with the ArkOS operating system, and many preinstalled games. There are a few problems with this card though:
- The card is of bad quality and will die sooner or later.
- ArkOS on the card is often outdated, and updating the OS may be challenging.
What I wanted to do was to a) install ArkOS on a fresh memory card of good quality and b) transfer the roms from the preinstalled card to the new card. This is how I did this:
Install fresh ArkOS and keep stock roms on R36S
- I bought a 128 gb SAMSUNG EVO PLUS MicroSD card from Amazon. This is a recommended card of good quality, highly compatible with the R36S.
- I downloaded the latest build of ArkOS here: https://github.com/AeolusUX/ArkOS-R3XS/releases and extracted the img-file to a folder on my PC.
- I used the Rufus USB tool to format the Samsung MicroSD card and install ArkOS on it. https://rufus.ie/ This will create two partitions on the card.
- I bought a USB MicroSD memory card reader (my old reader was rather slow, if you already have an fairly new adapter you can use that) and moved all content from the preinstalled card’s “Easyroms” partition to a folder on my PC.
- Then, I put the Samsung MicroSD card in my R36S and waited for it to finalize the initial setup.
- Finally, I put the Samsung MicroSD card in my card reader, and transferred the content from the folder on my PC to the Easyroms partition on the Samsung card.
- Done! Now I have a fresh ArkOS install and a ton of games to play! I also added a few of my own roms to the card, such as C64, Amiga, MSX2 and Vectrex games, as these were not included on the preinstalled card.
There are numerous other setups and ways to update ArkOS, including dual MicroSD-cards, manually adding your own games, and/or using Wifi dongles for updates, but I found this method being the most straight-forward way to quickly create a robust system ready for gaming.
Some initial settings to improve the experience on R36S
- Press start, go to UI settings -> Visible systems and choose the systems you want to be visible in the menu. First time I do this, I press “all”. Then, I deselect stuff like American Laser Games, Wolfenstein, EasyRPG and Pico-8.
- Now. “Options” should show up in your menu. Choose it, go to Devicetype, and choose “R35S” or “R36S”.
- Some useful button combinations: Y while a game is marked in menu = add to favorites. FN + START (twice) = quit game. FN + R1 = save game state. FN + L1 = load game state.
- However, the FN button in the Retroarch emulator is also tied to “fast forward”, which is a bit annoying. To adjust, choose “Retroarch” from the menu. Choose Settings->Input->HotKeys. Choose “Fast Forward Hold” and Press Y to remove this function (I don’t use it). Remember to save your settings by going to “Configuration File” and “Save Configuration File” in the Retroarch menu. Repeat for Retroarch32.
- Turn off the verbal battery warning: this seems a bit bugged. In options, audio, change “verbal battery voice” from Male to Female and switch it Off -> on and back to Off.
- PSP analog stick reversed by default: start a PSP game, press the right analog button (press the right analog stick) to bring up a menu. Go to Settings -> Controls -> Control Mapping -> Standard PSP Controls, and go down to analog controls, and remap the four directions.
- See also, my Portmaster post.