Made Progress on the r36s handheld.

 I got it last year and loaded a game on it and couldn't get it to not pop up the menu every few seconds because that menu had been mapped to clicking the left joystick. Super annoying. 

So I forgot about it, busy doing other things.  When I went to try it again, black screen of death, the cheap factory sd card had bit rotted. I installed arkos on it, I have screen three btw.  That was a challenge.  

Then I figured out how to get a working game without the annoying menu popup by mapping that menu onto another button.

I am still fighting the controls. I have not figured out now to map the controls for one game system without it screwing up a differrnt game.  Will have to write that up if I can figure out how it works. 

But I found a script to fix the movie playing on this version of arkos. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Deys0VsF0RA

and I figured out how to transcode videos to fit the screen size this saves a lot of space if you care abut that.

To transcode for r-36S

ffmpeg -i input_video.mp4 -vf "scale=640:-2" -c:v libx264 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 23 -c:a aac -b:a 128k output.mp4

for i in *.mkv; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -vf "scale=640:-2" -c:v libx264 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 23 -c:a aac "${i%.*}.mp4"; done

Image my surprise when I tried to auto-install ports and I learned that the port master in the tools menu is just a stub to download the real thing.  But I don't have wifi yet.  So I figured out how to install portmaster in one go locally. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/R36S/comments/1qvywsh/install_portmaster/#:~:text=Replace%20the%20stock%20SD%20Card,(Recommended%20for%20offline%20devices)

After that I loaded ko reader like I had on the kindle, but the controls can be mapped better there too.  Still working on making that work correctly.  It does things like press f2 to end screen saver, but f2 is not mapped to any buttons.  And just going into some directories makes the screen go black and I have to exit the book reader at that point, it could be missing a library for a cerrtain book type. 

I loaded rock box, and it is actually pretty good there. No notes there, but I used rock box decades ago on a sansa player.

I also loaded a audiobook reader and a game platform.  I tried to add more content to the audio book and it did not worrk, just locks up there, can't navigate to most of them to try it, might just see if rock box can play the books like it does music.

This is turning out to be a really great little device for going on long trips. Load it up with a few movies, some songs, a few books and audio books and it can do well enough to keep you distracted for a few hours. Might need a charge only cable hooked to a power bank or seat charger to keep it working llongerr than 5 hours.  Or we might be able to put a 3d printed cover over the battery and put a double sized battery in it.

Next up for this is to find a cheap wifi dongle that I can just plug into the usb c otg connector. And put in a 256GB sd card in the second slot for lots of media. Let them eat bread and circuses!!!