I finally got my two GKD350H, here are my observations and thoughts on it :
- The GKD350H's Soc is way faster than the JZ4770 found in the RG-350, GCW0 and PG2. At least 50% faster and up to 100%.
VBA Next is finally running smoothly on that device with little to no frameskipping aside from NES Classic games. (which are very CPU intensive and even the Retrostone 1 struggles with these so it's very impressive)
- The low memory, 128MB of RAM, can cause some swaping issues in games like SRB2Kart. Can be remedied somewhat
by putting the CPU level in the settings to the maximum. (level 7)
This also prevents ports like Supertuxkart from working ingame. But that game was not running smoothly on the RG-350 too anyway...
- No IPU support, as i expected. Manufacturer told me that IPU only works for ISP. However, i've talked to a few people about it
and looknig at the datasheet, it seems that they simply didn't want to bother.
- The Power button doesn't work like the menu button in the RG-350/GCW0/PG2 : it simply kills the app that is currently active.
The irony is that it does not always work in case of freezes... This also prevents bringing up the menu in some emulators.
Why ??
The build quality is pretty nice. Compared to the RG-350, it is lighter. The screen's tearing is also much less noticeable than the RG-350, on which it is very visible and pretty bad unless triple buffering is used. The GKD350H's screen is less prone to that thankfully.
The screen is also, in my opinion, looking better than the RG-350.
However, the RG-350 has better analog sticks than the GKD350. My analog stick on mine was spinning around itself out of the box...
I also noticed that they do look at my github repositories because they bundled the device with NGPCEmu, and my only public release of it was only for the GCW0 with IPU. They actually took my RS-97's video code in my branch and simply recompiled it against it.
The date is from September 25. At that time, i didn't add IPU support yet. It looks like they did this because they didn't like the fact that Race had no support for save states or ingame saves, lol...
There are no volume sliders : You must change the audio either in the settings or using Left/Right + Start.
Brightness can also be changed in small steps by pressing Up/Down + Start.
I haven't tested the battery life but it seems to have a lot of potential. The battery is decent too. (2800 mah)
With the single on a chip design (including the RAM built inside of the Soc), the battery life should be good. (they claim 6 hours but it could depend on the CPU level or brightness.)
Conclusion ? It's not too bad but unfortunately they should have put a little more effort on the software side of things. The analog stick is not as good as the RG-350. Maybe it could be fixed with some modding ?
I will be releasing my 350H specific ports here :
https://gitlab.com/gameblabla/gameblabla-releases/-/tree/master/opk/350hI'm just hoping that they would be releasing the source code for the kernel... Maybe.
EDIT: Battery is 2800mah, not 1000mah. My mistake.