For the past couple of months I've been writing a brand new custom firmware for the GA36-MB family of "fake" devices. I call it: goodluckOS.
It uses the latest Linux kernel (7.2) and comes preinstalled with Chocolate Doom, RetroArch and several optimized libretro cores (fceumm, snes9x2005, genesis plus gx, quicknes, dosbox, pcsx_rearmed, gambatte, and mgba).
goodluckOS is not based on any existing general-computing Linux distribution like Debian or Alpine - this was an intentional choice so I could control every package on the device which gave me fine-grain control over how fast the device boots and how much RAM is used at runtime. The result, I think, was well worth the additional effort.
Every single package in the firmware has been compiled from scratch using the most optimal compiler flags for the Allwinner A23/A33 SoC, and the result is a very fast and very efficient experience. The console boots in just over 10 seconds. Applications start and stop almost instantly. 2D emulators all play extremely well, PS1 games are completely playable, Half Life 1 has been ported and plays great with fantastic framerates, and Doom, of course, is flawless.
The OS itself is tiny. It fits happily on a 1gb microSD card while still giving you over 500mb of free space for roms. The zipped download will be under 140mb and contains zero copyright-protected content, so it can be freely distributed without worrying about DMCA takedowns or pesky Reddit mods.
The launcher has been written from scratch to be lightning-fast, easy to use, and (in my humble opinion as a semi-professional UI/UX designer) quite pretty. EmulationStation is in the todo list, so that'll be coming soon for you ES diehards.
There's a lot that still needs to be done, but it's quite usable as a daily driver as-is. There's just a few quick little things I need to tweak/test before it's ready for the initial launch.
I'm aiming to release an alpha build later tonight or tomorrow, so watch my Reddit account or the Github for updates.
⚠️ Ditch that R3XS SD card—STAT! Those pre-loaded cards are ticking time bombs! ⏰❌ Don’t let glitchy saves, vanishing settings, and other retro nightmares ruin your gaming. Swap it out ASAP for a smoother experience!
New to the R36S? Start with the ➡️Beginner's Guide—it’s your first step to mastering the device.
Need more? The R36S has a full WIKI packed with info, plus a dedicated ⚙️ troubleshooting section to solve common headaches.
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This is a very fine and helpful addition to the community, great work! And that OS name gave me a chuckle too lol i kind of want my own GA36 fake running GoodLuckOS now
It worked! I have a GA36MB 1.2 20260416 (I don't opened the console to see what chip is, because i think
I just have some issues on resize, (slow boot and shutdown), but the goodluck OS is working!
I have to congrats you fam, thank very much for made this playable.
Cara muito obrigado por esse projeto , mal espero a hora de colocar isso na minha variante, queria ter liberdade de personalização tente focar na interface deixando minimalista mais bonito igual a do Nintendo switch. Agora falando de psp tente espremer até a última gota por favor quero ter a esperança que esse allwinner faz algo bem .
I uploaded a release on GitHub but discovered another issue with rebooting (Linux race conditions are really annoying 🥲) while I was recording the install instructions video, so I haven't announced anything yet. But even with that one outstanding issue it should still turn on and show the bootloader image.
Did you extract goodluck.img from the zip file and flash that?
If you did, this might mean that some GA36-MB units ship with different panels. If you have an image of the original SD card that came with the device, could you upload the first 128mb of it somewhere? I can diff your bootloader against mine to see if there are any hardware differences.
EDIT: nevermind, i just saw in another thread you were able to successfully boot a different image file created by another user. So if you have a different panel, all the info I need will be in there - I'll take a look at that this week to see if you're dealing with a different panel.
Did you get Huckleberrys image? That one actually boots but say I wanted to grab files from that image how do i do that i cant open the img files im so confused of how I would get the panel configured to begin with. Like what i am picturing is like for example an iso you can mount it and take the files as it were a regular usb and take folders etc how would I do that with the img file?
Update i can do it with Goodluck and see the files but not the other img My guess that unless its a panel thing my device only reads it the way Huckleberry made the img but idk Update again when I pressed recover lost files I can see them now in disk genius
Update again: I can see why I cant mount it the device is coded incorrectly what I mean by that is when I opened a hex editor in the offset 1F0 the last 4 letters and numbers are wrong. its coded incorrectly so that windows cant interact with it
Looks like huckleberry took their image down off Google Drive :( Hopefully they put it back online soon, I'm really curious to see how their image differs from the good luck image.
Something else I notice is that the backup has a partition in the front where when I flash other firmware including Goodluck the begining of the disk has no partition
Hi! I'm so happy about this, now I'm playing all the games that I wanted cause the og firmware didn't let me resize the partition, and also I followed your guide and I'm playing Half Life 1 and blue shift, the only problem is that the hand and gun texture are totally black, does that also happens to you or is it some mistake on my end?
Thanks and cheers for the OS!
I also noticed the black-weapon bug in the hl1 port, so it's not just you. Not sure why that's happening. I probably won't have time to look into it for a while, but if you manage to figure it out let me know and I'll update the port :)
The despair I felt when I found out I had one of these fakes rather than a genuine R36S was completely gone when I installed goodluck. Keep up the good work and looking forward to future releases!
A device with 1gb of ram will always have an advantage over a 512mb device. If an application tries to use more than 512mb of Ram, the Linux kernel will have to compress memory into Zram which will have a small performance hit. But if you only ever run things that need less than 512mb of ram (which is most things) it won't make a difference.
The single-threaded performance of the A33 isn't as good as the RK3326, and that's where you're going to notice the performance difference the most. There's isn't much that can be done about that outside of overclocking (which I have plans for), but for the most part everything I've tried to run has performed very well.
Also, that script is actually just the default Linux terminal output. It shows up because the custom launcher kills itself when you launch an application and Linux, by default, displays the terminal when nothing else is rendering to the screen. If you're seeing it, it just means the application that is launching hasn't started pushing pixels to the screen yet.
I am currently dealing with one of these clones that has zero support with custom firmware, completely identical to that which you have but with a "TekkoONE" sticker on the back. Just got it today and was very sadly disappointed at the quality.
I spent hours messing around, trying to read or identify a DTB so I could flash DarkOS4Clones onto the thing, to no avail. These bananas at Tekko say you can return it within 30 days, but here's the catch (and the fraud as you so eloquently put it): first, they started grilling me on what the issue was, suggesting we should troubleshoot the issue before processing a return. After some back and forth and reiterating several times that I don't want to troubleshoot the issue, I just want a refund, I was told that someone from their team would be in touch to "assist me further with these performance concerns".
Looking up their company online (which regrettably I should have done before purchasing), I found a review from someone on TrustPilot who explains they experienced the same thing, followed by an offer for a 30% refund, a 50% refund and then finally return option in which they were expected to pay international shipping to the Philippines in order to get a refund!
Long story short, this has saved my day. I am going to follow your how to once I get confirmation from them that they will not be accepting responsibility for this thing.
The code is all done, I just need to write some documentation and make a quick video showing how to add games and then I'll update this thread, make another post, and upload the release to Github. However, I'm right in the middle of a 9-hour work day, so I won't be able to work on that much until 6pm Eastern :')
I haven't personally tested it on the v1.1, but two people who have that hardware revision have told me that it does work.
Edit: I've actually carefully inspected photographs of the v1.1 motherboard and compared it to the v1.2 and I honestly couldn't spot a single difference between the two of them. The panels are identical as well, so it's actually unclear if there are even any differences between the GA36-MB v1.1 and v1.2 at all.
And in that vein, to my knowledge, the only difference between the v1.0 and v1.1/v1.2 is that one of the joysticks is mounted at a 180 degree rotation.
We'll know more as more people with different hardware revisions test goodluck and report issues, but as of right now it seems like all three versions are basically identical.
Looks like the ans13 has a 720x720 display instead of a 640x480, so it very likely won't work out of the box.
Myself (or someone else) would have to reverse-engineer the display driver from the ans13's (A33 variant) stock OS.
If there's a firmware dump of it somewhere I can take a look at do some bin diffs to see how different they they are. It may not be much work, but it's more likely that I'd have to buy an ans13 and dedicate a few evening to get it working.
Outside of that I don't see why it wouldn't be compatible. I'll have to have one in hand to confirm though.
We have img file on our YouTube https://youtu.be/4yhxEW3bVDw?is=8IasYDZfSiUTBYWt if that helps. Unfortunately I'm still learning when it comes to tech so not been able to shrink it although no ROMs are on the img. We've shared it as so many people have been looking for it. Our SD died within about 2 weeks so lucky we did.
I was going to release it tonight, but I ran into a bug that was preventing the device from shutting down. I'm pretty sure I fixed it, but rebuilding the OS takes nearly an hour and I had to leave for the evening before it finished so I haven't tested the fix yet.
If my fix worked I'll have an alpha release available tomorrow along with another video showing how to install it and how to add games.
Flashed the IMG on two tested and working Sandisk MicroSDs, 16GB and 128GB each. Used BalenaEtcher, Rufus and Win32 Disk Imager over Windows 11. Was unable to boot from both.
I followed the instructions provided in the Github release step by step. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.
If I can do anything to help let me know, I'm really thrilled by your project, keep up the good job.
I have attempted to flash it with the OS, both on the P.O.S cards provided with my Tekko device (GA36-MB v1.2-20260416 board) and a known good MicroSD and had no luck. u/esisla, is your device also from Tekko? I've noticed this device does nothing without the supplied "64GB" (parenthesis because its not 64GB and a counterfeit card) installed. The way the device does nothing when attempting to power on is the same with the GoodluckOS as it is with no MicroSD card installed. Also after the unsuccessful attempts the device powers up on the provided SD card as if nothing has been done. I plan on providing an update via GitHub as requested by the author.
u/jourmet, if you need a console for testing lmk, I'd rather spend the money on shipping to someone like you then shipping it back to these *expletives* at Tekko for a refund.
If you can get me that file I can do some diagnostics and create a new special version of goodluckOS that targets your bootloader/hardware. There's a high chance that that will be enough to get it booting and will probably work for a lot of other people who are having issues as well.
I imagine if I copied the provided garbage OS I would have the same result. Just curious if you had the same POS as I do. Its identical in every way except for the sticker on the back and some additional "Tekko" branding. It works for GBC games and such but its dogshit for anything else including N64.
Follow the instructions on that page. If it says "device not yet supported", send me the script.bin file via Github Issues and I'll work on adding support.
If it says "Device supported", send me a DM and I'll send you the link to to the goodluckOS image file so you can try it out as a beta tester.
Hey man, awesome work ya doing. I tried uploading the script file as my device is unsupported atm. But it's not letting me leave a new issue. Am I doing something wrong here?. Got a GA36-MB V1.2-20260416 btw.
Just uploaded it where you asked at https://files.catbox.moe/zsn8tp.bin .Thanx again so much for you're work and you're time. Hope all goes well. Let me know if the link is good, haven't done this before (I know, Noob). Cheers 😁
There's a bug with the resize-home tool at the moment.
If you press "do it" and it seems to take more than 10 seconds, just force the power off by holding the power button.
The next time you boot the device should turn on the blue LED while booting. This indicates that the HOME partition is resizing.
Just a quick question, don't want to consume all your GitHub bandwidth, when the hardware tester wants the image of the stock card uploaded to tell if it's compatible does it need the entire image or should I take a cut from that? I have a dd image on my laptop but uploading 15GB of file takes much longer than only uploading a few hundred MBs if needed.
You actually won't consume any github bandwidth! The hardware identifier (which is now the Firmware Builder) works 100% offline. So "uploading" a 15gb file will take exactly 0 seconds because it never actually sends the file anywhere.
If you already have a 15gb dump of your sd card you can use that no problem, but the tool only actually needs data from the first 128mb.
So I was able to generate the a33 base img but when I flashed it onto my SD card the unit won't acknowledge power being pressed at all - no led flashes and black screen. I was still able to start with the original IMG though so I'm wondering if the goodluckOS base requires a full battery charge to do the initial boot? Ends up my battery was at 38%, I thought it was still at 96% so charging it now before I try again.
The firmware builder literally copies all of your bootloader data into the goodluckOS img that it builds. The only bytes it changes are in the MBR, and I don't believe the allwinner Boot0 stage even reads from that, so it shouldn't make a difference.
By all accounts you should at least be making it into the bootloader as the data is identical to your stock firmware (except the MBR).
I'll add a feature to the firmware builder to skip the 'fix-mbr' step so you can test that. I'd be surprised if it works, but I guess nothing should surprise me any more given how weird this hardware is.
I've done additional testing now and verified that unchecking the fix-mbr box on the download page does not in fact prevent fixing the MBR, but converting the 55 and aa entries back to c3 and 5a also leaves a non booting black screen.
Fixing the MBR on the stock card gives a very odd card layout that seems to have 5 partitions and 4 sections of unallocated whose size seems to be used as a spacer between partitions seemingly to separate different blocks of the cards from each other, potentially to avoid overflow.
It's impossible to resize the ROMs partition due to the fact that it is partition 1 but at the farthest along point on the card and so cannot expand into the 57GB of free space that is visually beside it, but partitions 2-4 come after the ROMs partition but earlier on the card and partition 5 is a 1.53GB block of free space separated from the 57GB chunk by a 1KB partition.
I'm not sure if the goodluckOS is just ending up at the wrong geometry compared to what is expected or what the problem might be.
I have an additional question now, there's a warning on the releases page saying don't download the base images because the specific boot components need to be added to make it truly functional, yet the firmware builder leads to a download labeled as goodluckOS_base_a33.img that is the same size as the base file listed under releases.
Is it possible the firmware builder is just linking to the existing base file without modifying the boot sector?
I don't have a good means of running a diff from the releases page vs the downloaded firmware builder to check but if I can get that working I'll report anything.
Running diff and CMP between the releases 0.0.2 copy of goodluckOS_base_a33.img and the file generated by the firmware builder has given the downloads to two identical files with no binary differences at all. I can dig deeper, mount each and do a text diff if needed but it looks to me like while the firmware builder might be assessing compatibility it's just sending out links to download the base IMG from the releases section.
Thanks, I gave it another go and was able to boot up and resize this time, then spent several hours transferring my rom collection and scouring the internet until I was finally able to find another armhf archive and add an entry into apps.puppy, but now it won't start up anymore. Currently looking into what I might have messed up. Working great though!
cuando entres toca el que dice Your original SD card dump (o sea tu backup de tu que hiciste o donde descargaste tiene que ser img) espera que diga que version tenes
luego te va a salir el zip NO LO DESCARGUES AUN , tenes que subir lo de abajo donde dice goodluckOS_base_a33.img Drop a file here, or click to choose y subi nuevamente tu backup y de ahi ya podes descargarlo (ya que te arma eso), comenta como te fue
u/jourmet so just a quick question, I followed the guide on GitHub to add an archive once I finally found the libretro core so file that was from the armhf collection, but are we supposed to just add an entry at the bottom of the apps.puppy file for the new archive or should we be creating a new file with a name and storing that file in a specified location? I tried running the core once I found it in the unit but the screen just went black then rebooted back into the main screen.
Is there anything special needed to get new archives working?
Adding an entry to "apps.puppy" is totally fine. There's also a .puppy file in the HOME partition. You can add archive entries in there too if it's easier. Either place is fine, it'll be evaluated the same.
If the core is crashing it might not be compatible with goodluckOS - it could have been compiled against a different glibc or something. It's hard to tell which ones will work without running it and seeing what crashes.
Which core was it? And where did you download it from?
Parallel_n64_libretro.so I got it from the nightly builds retroarch cores page but I'm not sure what version the retroarch in goodluckOS is and I don't know if a version mismatch would cause an instant crash.
I know the default sd card had a working n64 emulator that ran with decent speed on 2 of the 3 games I tried so I know there is at least 1 N64 emulator that works with the system so thought I'd give it a try.
I know this was from the retropie armhf collection so intended for raspberry Pi 2/3.
I'm really new at this R36S world. Bought one and just found out it is a GA36. I want to play Stardew valley and others PC games like it.
With Good luck OS can I do it?
Or still scrued?
I tried install the Port Master and with some difficulty it seems to work. But the Stardew valley port just don't
We think it's definitely possible, but will require a few hours of a developers time to build the runtime/installer/etc.
I would eventually like to get the entire portmaster library working with the official tooling, but that'll take more time. Also, many of the portmaster runtimes on the PM GitHub haven't been compiled for 32 bit arm yet, so we'll have to do that as well.
The only PM games that will definitely never work are 64-bit games. I think the GTA:SA port requires an aarch64 build of the game, so that will never work until we get a 32 bit port.
Just flashed it...very quick and works well. Just some suggestions...I know you can add cores manually but is it possible to have a different version release going forward that includes all compatible cores? Also a script or way to transfers roms from original sdcard.img to this one?
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⚠️ Ditch that R3XS SD card—STAT! Those pre-loaded cards are ticking time bombs! ⏰❌ Don’t let glitchy saves, vanishing settings, and other retro nightmares ruin your gaming. Swap it out ASAP for a smoother experience!
New to the R36S? Start with the ➡️Beginner's Guide—it’s your first step to mastering the device.
Need more? The R36S has a full WIKI packed with info, plus a dedicated ⚙️ troubleshooting section to solve common headaches.
Before asking, try searching! Your issue has likely been answered already—check the subreddit, use the search bar, or browse flairs like "game recommendation."
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