Introducing: goodluckOS

For the longest time, consoles such as the GA36-MB were shunned from the r36s community. Users were told 'too bad', 'e-waste', and 'get a refund' when they came looking for help. And while a refund is a good idea, for many, that simply wasn't possible.

And so they suffered. Unable to load custom games, unable to customize their firmware, and, throttled by the criminal negligence known as the 'stock firmware', unable to take advantage of the true power of their device.

until today.

Our highly-skilled engineers have worked tirelessly to rescue you unfortunate lot from the perils of bad code. Today, we are proud to present:

goodluckOS: a custom firmware for Allwinner A23/A33-based handheld consoles, meticulously crafted to be as light-weight and high-performance as possible.

IF YOU CAN'T GET YOUR MONEY BACK, GET YOUR MONEY'S WORTH. WITH GOODLUCK.

■ FEATURES ■

PUPPY

Puppy is an application launcher. It's easy to use, simple to add applications to, and starts and stops lightning-fast. It completely closes when not in use, using exactly zero bytes of ram when you're not looking at it.

AUTOSTART

Don't want to use Puppy? Fine. Mark any application as Autostart to launch it immediately when the console boots. Never see Puppy again. We won't judge you.

KILL EM' ALL

Kill any application from anywhere by pressing the three center buttons. This will instantly bring you right back to the launcher.

NO SWAP - NO DEAD SD

The stock OS mounts swap on the sd card. Bad idea! goodluckOS uses zram swap instead so there's no chance of killing your expensive sd card.

PLAY IN THE DARK

When the screen is on, the LEDs stay OFF. No more blinding blue led giving you a migraine while you're playing bubble bobble at 4am on a work night.

COMPILER OPTIMIZED

Every package in the goodluckOS is compiled from scratch specifically for the Allwinner A23/A33 SoC architecture, meaning every instruction runs as fast as it possibly can.

BUILT FOR SIZE

goodluckOS is built with only the absolutely necessary packages to get you playing games. This makes the entire build tiny. The whole OS will happily fit on a 512mb micro SD card with room to spare.

EASY TO BUILD

Built with a novel, easy-to-use containerised build system. You can customize and rebuild the entire OS image in 5 or 6 commands. All you need is Docker and a text editor.

USB ROOT SHELL

USB tty enabled by default. Plug the OTG port into your PC and `screen` into it at 115200 baud for instant root access.

FAST STARTUP

Boots up in 10 seconds. The stock OS takes over 50. That's 40 seconds added to your life. No need to thank me.

SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS

KERNEL: Mainline Linux 7.2 (A23/A33-Optimized)
SIZE: Fits on a 1gb MicroSD card
DOWNLOAD SIZE: 137mb
GLIBC: 2.44
LICENSE: GPL 2.0
DISPLAY DRIVER: Reverse-engineered (shout out to the NSA for ghidra, u guys rule)
GAMEPAD DRIVER: Reverse-engineered
DEVICE TREE: Reverse-engineered, built from scratch
SWAP: ZSwap
BUILD: Easy-to-use, containerised build system

高品質

What's wrong with the stock OS?

TL;DR: It's TRASH [ ごみ ].

It mounts swap to the SD card, which will kill it.
It ships with broken, incompatible versions of system libraries
It can't be flashed to an sd card smaller than 16gb
It's full of random, unused, arbitrary files
The file system is a mess
There's weird, unmountable, unecessary hidden partitions everywhere
You can't mount the roms partition without f***ING around in a device block hex editor
The retrolib cores it ships with are old and compiled with non-optimal flags
The stock build of emulation-station is ancient and slow
They somehow they made retroarch take >5 seconds to start up
The kernel is ancient and proprietary so you can't use modern kernel features like zram
You can't adjust the screen brightness from within applications
As a matter of fact, the FN button doesn't do anything at all
No chance of getting portmaster to work

goodluckOS fixes all of this, and more.

Installation

IMPORTANT NOTICE [ 重要なお知らせ ]
GOODLUCKOS AND ALL AFFILIATED DEVELOPERS WILL ACCEPT NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR DAMAGED HARDWARE, DATA LOSS, OR LOSS OF USE OF ANY DEVICE. GOODLUCKOS IS EXPERIMENTAL SOFTWARE. BY ATTEMPTING TO INSTALL THE OPERATING SYSTEM YOU ACCEPT THIS RISK.

STEP 01

GET A NEW MICROSD CARD

Throw away that unbranded generic microSD card that came with your unit. Get yourself a high-quality MicroSD media of at least 1gb capacity.

STEP 02

DOWNLOAD GOODLUCKOS

Download goodluckOS.zip from here.

STEP 03

UNZIP IT

Unzip goodluckOS.zip. The image file should extract into a 1gb .img file.

STEP 04

FLASH IT

Use software such as DD, BalenaEtcher, or Rufus to write `goodluckOS.img` directly to the new sd card. This will wipe all data on the card.

STEP 05

EXPAND HOME (Optional)

Turn it on. Once you're in, find the 'resize-home' application, launch it, and follow the steps. This will resize your home partition to fill up all the available space on your microSD card

Problems?

This a pre-release alpha version, so you're probably going to run into some issues.

If you do, let us know!

Open a new issue on github, describe the problem, and we'll dispatch one of our trained associates to dedicate the remainder of their life to making you happy.

Adding Games?

goodluckOS comes stock with Chocolate Doom. Not good enough for you? Add your own!

Plug the microSD card into your computer
Mount the HOME partition
Open the roms folder
Open the subfolder for the console you want to add games for.
Drop your rom file in there.
If you're feeling extra fancy, throw a little png/jpg in the icons folder too (with the same name as your rom file)

Adding Cores?

Yes, yes, you can add cores. Calm down.

Plug the microSD card into your computer
Mount the HOME partition
Create a folder called cores in the root of the HOME partition.
Paste your new core (.so file) in there.
Now open the apps.puppy file at the root of the HOME partition.
Copy the [ARCHIVE] entry lines, removing the # comment characters.
Paste it into the file and customize it to match your new core, ensure that the COMMAND line points to /home/player/cores/{your_new_core}.so

You can find compatible cores here: https://buildbot.libretro.com/nightly/linux/armhf/latest/

Most of these cores work, but they're not compiled with all the right optimization flags, so performance won't be the best it can possibly be. Open a github issue if there's a core you want us to add to the stock OS.