2025-09-19 (last update: 2025-09-19)

EmuELEC's R36S clone

2025-09-19

[EmuELEC's clone of] R36S arrived today and so I'll be posting about it in the coming days. As well as about old games.

A photo of black variant of the R36S which generally looks like Gameboy but with two analog sticks at the bottom.

Turns out that I bought a clone from EmuELEC and at first I was considering returning it, but it's actually still usable for 16-bit games that I was planning to explore first and foremost. I also found a version of the system for this model (it's crucial because the memory card delivered with these devices is no good and requires a replacement). So I thought why not? The idea was to dip my toes in this type of consoles. Long-term, I'm eyeing Anbernic's RG406V.

2025-09-20

I clicked the return in Amazon and I printed the label for the package and with every step, I'm losing interest in the whole procedure. Now I will have to go to the post office and worse, find a box big enough to contain the label, so also secure the contents of the package. Then I need to send it back to China and this cost will not be returned and how much percentage of the device I'm willing to pay? 30%? 50%? I might as well forego it. A lesson for the future.

But a good thing happened due to that. As I was printing the label, I saw (again) that my daughter's Epson printer doesn't print yellow colour and I dove into how to fix that. Head cleaning did nothing, but my suspicion is that my daughter prints so rarely that the ink got stuck in the tubes. For that there is Power Cleaning 💪 and we'll see in 12 hours how it went. We definitely print too rarely to have a colour printer, which was my argument from the beginning.

Before I managed to cancel the second refund, I've been recharged (on Sunday morning, even before my coffee that day), so I guess I get to keep the money and the device.

Review

Okay, so if the device stays with me, let's review it. Mind you, this is an EmuELEC clone's review.

The build seems solid, the buttons are hard and are working well, the screen is bright and allows comfortable playing (from my point of view, for a limited number of games, but we'll get to that). The speaker, though, is shit; I got headache after 2 minutes with it, and I was concerned that's the sound module's fault, but it's decent with gaming headphones I plugged in.

The games. It's preloaded with thousands of them, but some are like US/European versions or the same game for multiple platforms (so, still valuable from comparison point of view). Generally, a lot of playing if you will. Provided the console doesn't break, I would probably be set for life with them, just like I was with a collection of vaporwave music that I bought for 2 dollars 7 years ago (I still haven't listened to all of them at least once).

The screen is 3.5-inch and has 640x480 resolution, which is twice that the original 8- and 16-bit consoles displayed on 14-inch TVs back in the days. And this works pretty well. I tried a couple of games from SNES and Sega Mega Drive, and it clicks in fantastically. Pixelated graphics look good on such a small screen. I tried playing "Batman of the Future" from Nintendo 64 and the result was a bit worse (for instance, the text is not legible). This brings new life to these old productions.

The device has 2 analog sticks, but I still haven't seen a game that would use both of them. The left one doubles with D-pad, so even that one is used more or less accidentally. But it's crazy that there were mouse-oriented games released for Mega Drive, like "Cannon Fodder." However, with the analog stick it's a tad better. I always say that controls is what got old the most in case of those old games, and that's the biggest value of remasters for me.

It looks like SNES and Mega Drive have some games I played on my Amiga 1200 and my first PC (486 DX4 100 Mhz :D), so I'm gonna go with those 2 consoles first. I started playing with "Blackthorne," after 30 years of not playing it. Then I found "The Chaos Engine," an absolute hit, which looks amazing on the small screen. Who would have thought that pixel art would have hidden advantages in the future? Certainly not me.

I found a lot of movie adaptations, like all the Disney cartoons, Terminators, Robocop, "True Lies" [sic!], and "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (who was it for? because the movie was for adults and it's a platformer, but whatever). There is even "Cutthroat Island," which I've been planning to see for years at this point. It might be that I play the game sooner. I doubt I will finish any of them, but I would definitely like to see them. I read about a lot of them when a was a teenager.

And that's it for now.

2025-09-22

Firmware update

It could have been faster had I read the instructions well the first time around. But well, I'm a Pole and we don't read manuals.

A photo of a retro console with splash screen saying ROCKNIX

For my future self:

  1. Copy files from the original card (games and this file: rf3536k3ka.dtb).
    • A card that has been tested to work is this: Kingston Canvas Select Plus Tarjeta microSD, SDCS2/128GBSP Class 10, 128 GB
  2. Download the -b variant of Rocknix: https://nightly.rocknix.org/
  3. Create a bootable card.
  4. Create the overlays file here: https://rocknix.gosk.in/dtbo/ (using file rf3536k3ka.dtb), select 2-sticks variant and inverted headphone detection, then follow the instruction underneath.
  5. Insert the card into the device, so it can adjust partition and run initial config.

Note: Without rf3536k3ka.dtb, I would have to guess the proper panel from those: https://github.com/stolen/r.nix-distribution/releases/tag/panel_overlays. Doable if you lost your original file, but it would be trial and error.

Games covered