Hi my name is Manuel, i'm a big fan of retro gaming handhelds, especially Anbernic's devices and here is my story.
Holding a retro gaming handheld in my hands for the first time gave me flashback to the good old 80th and 90th. This was my childhood time and i have so much positive memories to that time, playing exciting vido games at my friends house. These devices have the power to bring back the good vibes of your childhood when video games was a passion...
In early 2020 i bought myself the first retro gaming handheld. Actually the first one was a RS-97 from Anbernic. But from my expectations, it wasn't any good. Small display, low CPU, screen tearing, etc..but not much time later, Anbernic announced a new handheld that caught my attention: The RG350...this is where my story began.
As i got my RG350 i had splitted feelings about it. I was quiet happy with the form factor, the display and the decend CPU/GPU power of the device, except the big analog sticks. Still, the user menu and useability was a pain in the ***. So i digged deeper into the rabbithole to find out what possibilities i had to change stuff here :)
Since it was running OpenDingux as OS (a Linux distribution) i was able to connect to the device via USB-To-Network and explore it a little further. So i did what a man does...i opened GOOGLE and searched for more information about this device... but just found a big void. There was not much information about this device out there at this time and it felt like you find gold as i finally found the secret about this device...it it mainly is a copy of a open-source handheld project that was crowdfounded on kickstarter.com by Justin Barwick called:
The GCW Zero
Actually this device was the god-father of all upcoming retro-gaming handhelds we know today.
Almost any application that was written for the GCW Zero was able to run on the RG350. And by GCW Zero i found a big bunch of github repositories and web-sites that shared content for this device. Further supported emulator, download managers, and front/backends such as EmulationStation and RetroArch.
The user menu on the RG350 on OpenDingux felt like the useability of Win3.11. Not what you would expect from a retro gaming console. So i decided to make it my first project on this device to improve the usebility by adding EmulationStation as front-end to it.
I was also looking for online tutorials on Youtube as i found that there was no help to be found there. As i figured out how to install EmulationStation to the RG350, optimize the settings, add emulators and boxart and put it on auto-start from the OpenDingux OS i decided to help others as well by sharing my knowledge online. The best way to do this from my point of view was Youtube since it allows to present all required steps not just my text, but also by film and voice. Beside that i found this a good chance to get in touch with Youtube content creation what always was a interest of me. The rest of my story can be seen in audio and video on Youtube www.youtube.com/c/MashTec :)