Retro handheld consoles anyone?

[BrotSagtMist]

It actually broke on the first day, one emulator crashed and damaged the file system. I had to manually fsck it.
I do not seem to be able to find the exact same system image, thus i made a copy of it already. So this is save to play.

[scorelessmusic]

It has been more than a year since the last post on this topic, but I did want to chime in because I believe there is a surge of interest and likely a considerable swell of new owners of such handheld consoles.

After some research, I have bought one for myself to prototype some ideas I have and I am using Love2d to run on my handheld. It's a very smooth process! After making the .love file on my mac, I just copy it into the /love2d/ folder on the SD card and pop it into the handheld to run without having to do anything else.

I'm only less than 1 week into developing for my handheld (the name/model is R36S) and I am having loads of fun! I would say that the main switch in mindset is to cater for console inputs (d-pads, dual joy sticks etc) and to optimize for small screen size and rez (640x480 resolution).

If it's of any interest, I'll be happy to post more about my development journey on the R36S here.

[BrotSagtMist]

Nice one.
Yea ive been buying a few of these now but as it turns out i dont have the time to work on them, so, its all on the do later pile.
I am basically interested in what OS you are running there, afaik none of the devices have here have an OS that has Löve just preinstalled, altough they do have folders for it they lacked the binary.

[marclurr]

I'm also interested in which OS your using. I tried to run one of my games on my RGB30 a while back but didn't get anywhere. It's running the default JelOS IIRC.

[scorelessmusic]

I got the R36S running the community build of ArkOS. The .love bundle runs without any fuss but could also be dependent on what you're doing with the code.

I'm building from scratch to test how far I can push it. Going to start on adding some interesting interactions now to verify how low the latency is for the inputs (for live music instrument playing... since I make music apps)

I'll post my findings here to help jumpstart anyone else looking to do love2d console programming. Feel free to ask me anything and I'll do what I can to answer.

The main thing I discovered is that L3 and R3 are not mapped to anything that love2d can detect for now. Hopefully, my feedback to the community build of ArkOS can fix that.

The video demo of the input tester is on another post viewtopic.php?p=261367#p261367.

[scorelessmusic]

This is the discovered key mapping for r36s - ArkOS 2.0 (08232024-1 AeUX)

D-PAD
: up - w
: left - a
: down - s
: right - d

Buttons
: X - space
: Y - b
: B - lshift
: A - z

FN - (nil)
SEL - esc
START - return

POWER - power
VOLUMEUP - volumeup
VOLUMEDOWN - volumedown

L-Stick
: up - up
: left - left
: down - down
: right - right

R-Stick
: up - (mouse movement)
: left - (mouse movement)
: down - (mouse movement)
: right - (mouse movement)

Back
: L1 - l
: L2 - x
: R1 - r
: R2 - y

Extra (manually edit gptokeyb file on console, otherwise disabled)
: L3 - 1
: R3 - 2

---

I'm going to code a simple piano next. Hope to finish by tonight.

[marclurr]

I got the R36S running the community build of ArkOS. The .love bundle runs without any fuss but could also be dependent on what you're doing with the code.

By this do you mean that Löve was pre installed with the with the community build?

[scorelessmusic]

By this do you mean that Löve was pre installed with the with the community build?

Yes, all I needed to do was to properly prepare my .love bundle, and drop it in a /love2d/ folder in the SD card.

Boot up the device, and BAM!... the game / app is automatically populated and ready for selection and running.

I just did a new app today and I'll be posting a video of it soon.

Scoreless Music Piano running on an R36S natively (without any tweaks)

SMPiano.jpg (2.91 MiB) Viewed 677 times

[scorelessmusic]

Got my daughters to user-test this. They don't have piano training so it was interesting to see how they took to it.

[siberian]

By this do you mean that Löve was pre installed with the with the community build?

ArkOS has Love2D 11.4 after this topic.
I had to update the OS on my device to get love2d.