Handheld Tinkering · ETHANYEANG / SHENZHEN

Handheld Tinkering

Two handhelds, four Linux builds and a 3D-printed grip: taking the R36S and RG353V apart until they feel like machines worth holding.

MY ROLE

Everything by hand: flashing, partitioning, teardown and modification, 3D printing, shooting and writing.

RG353V 主板实拍 — **RG353V board, out of the shell**The board, bare, is where the answer usually is

RG353V · Cast to the living-room TV

Two controllers and a cast to the living-room TV, playing Half-Life with my father. This thing was always a small computer, not just a game console.

RG353V · 造梦西游 button mapping

The saves came out of a Flash launcher a friend wrote, the buttons were remapped, and a new save was written. Running that childhood game end to end on a handheld was worth the effort.

HARDWARE / REAL PHOTOS

THE PROJECT

I started with handhelds last September and could not tell a “clone handheld” from an Android TV box. Then I flashed one system after another — EEOS, ArkOS, RockNIX, DarkOS — and realised they are all trimmed-down Linux. The fun moved from playing games to changing the machine.

Two machines, both in use

Two devices today. The R36S got a 3D-printed grip, a shoulder-button modification and a new back shell, and finally feels built to be held; the RG353V was opened to look at the board, repartitioned with fdisk, given its own boot scripts, and now sits under the TV as a small console with a controller. The games still matter: the 造梦西游 saves were pulled out of a Flash launcher a friend built and run on the handheld, and the GBA Pokémon ROM hack runs a full team from one evolution line.

Experiments describe their actual environment and scope. Check the linked source for implementation details, license, current support and reproduction steps.

Two machines, both in use

R36S / r36s.space

World Model Playground

Classic Phones