Anbernic RG35XX: GarlicOS
May. 1st, 2023 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA fork of the OnionOS that fans made for the Miyoo Mini (and now comes stock on the Miyoo Mini Plus), GarlicOS is an alternate frontend for the RG35XX.
The advantages over the stock OS are that it supports more emulators, lets you over/underclock the system, exposes RetroArch menus and has the new auto-save and switch-recents menu. The biggest disadvantage is that it breaks the utility of the Menu button: Pressing the menu button dumps you out of your current game, and you need to remember Menu+button hotkey combinations to do things like expose the RetroArch menu, save states, activate fast forward, and all the like. Which I might tolerate if the utilities it exposes worked better, but every cheat that I tried crashed the system to a black screen and I needed the reset button. The fast-forward only activates through the hotkey combos. The save states (besides the most recent one) are more obtuse and harder to use for anything besides swapping games. The game selection menus are actively worse, not supporting pictures and not checking for the right file types. I tried manually changing themes, but I wasn't terribly enthused by anything I could find and you need to manually replace the theme files by popping the card.
Thankfully, I can just pop my original SD card back in and go back to the stock OS. But this really makes me squeamish about upgrading OnionOS on the MiyooMini+, because that already exposes RetroArch and does it with the proper Menu button utilities.
Overall: No sir, I don’t like it.
The advantages over the stock OS are that it supports more emulators, lets you over/underclock the system, exposes RetroArch menus and has the new auto-save and switch-recents menu. The biggest disadvantage is that it breaks the utility of the Menu button: Pressing the menu button dumps you out of your current game, and you need to remember Menu+button hotkey combinations to do things like expose the RetroArch menu, save states, activate fast forward, and all the like. Which I might tolerate if the utilities it exposes worked better, but every cheat that I tried crashed the system to a black screen and I needed the reset button. The fast-forward only activates through the hotkey combos. The save states (besides the most recent one) are more obtuse and harder to use for anything besides swapping games. The game selection menus are actively worse, not supporting pictures and not checking for the right file types. I tried manually changing themes, but I wasn't terribly enthused by anything I could find and you need to manually replace the theme files by popping the card.
Thankfully, I can just pop my original SD card back in and go back to the stock OS. But this really makes me squeamish about upgrading OnionOS on the MiyooMini+, because that already exposes RetroArch and does it with the proper Menu button utilities.
Overall: No sir, I don’t like it.
