Okay, it’s good now. The Miniloong Pocket 1 was released to moderate fanfare from the community for its 4-inch, high-resolution screen, comfortable and quiet controls, goofy pseudo-futuristic design, and an attempt at modularity that will earn itself a gold star on the fridge from its mother for about a week. The console was made by…somebody and released everywhere. But of course a console is only as good as its software experience, and that was by far the worst thing about it on release.
Simply titled MiniloongOS, it’s a Linux-based OS; it has a very simple UI and interface with a pre-configured version of RetroArch in the background. It is absolutely terrible, and it almost gaslit me into thinking the tried and true RK3566 with 1GB of RAM is too little for simple to run Super Nintendo games.
I Hate LoongOS
Home-cooked proprietary operating systems on these devices aren’t a new thing, with Anbernic and Miyoos at least being functional on release. But Miniloong’s, in my opinion, isn’t even possible for someone who is new to the niche. Okay, enough for the harshness, let’s elaborate.
The menu is simple, but notably laggy, and any attempts at adjusting the volume are met with a loud and non-toggleable CLICK. Just in case you want to alert your partner exactly what volume you are at before booting up Pokémon for 5 minutes. Game performance is also bad in the default configuration. At first glance, games might run okay, but a second glance is borderline infuriating.
In order to save on performance in lazily configured RetroArch, audio lag is often sent to 128ms, which should be noticeable to anybody playing a 2D game if you jump or access menus. Adjusting this to anything almost tolerable, like 64ms, will result in laggy performance and garbled audio. This is not a limitation of the chipset; it is a result of a terribly inefficient OS and badly configured RetroArch. Sidenote, the refresh rate is set to about 61hz, so your games are playing inaccurately out of the gate in terms of speed and pitch.
I heard there were some improvements in the firmware, but Wi-Fi straight up doesn’t work for me for an OTA. I tried through hotspot, true factory reset, through my home Wi-Fi, and on a second unit I had on hand for some reason. Nothing. But this isn’t an article about how bad LoongOS is, oh no, this is about ROCKNIX.
Install ROCKNIX on the Miniloong Pocket 1
A branch of ROCKNIX called ‘AURKNIX’ was created by AveyondFly to be compatible with more devices than the official branch. This version is also updated regularly to have parity with official, so expect the latest ROCKNIX version here.
On the Miniloong, Aurknix (ROCKNIX) lives on the SD card and doesn’t affect the original operating system, so if you miss the allure of the volume beeps, that’s an option for you. Downloading and flashing this version has slight differences from the official branch, so I’ll go through the steps here. Notably, this release also creates a “Games” partition that can be accessed on Windows, so you’ll only need 1 SD card.
Step 1: Download the latest image here.
Step 2: Flash it to a formatted SD card using your favorite flasher (I like Balena Etcher).
Step 3: Once complete, your SD card should have a ROCKNIX and GAMES partition. Open the ROCKNIX directory.
Step 4: Navigate to “extlinux” and open the .conf file in Notepad. Here you’ll change “Powkiddy-55.dtb” to “minilong.dtb” (only one ‘O’) and save your changes. Eject the SD card.
Step 5: Insert the SD card into your powered-off Miniloong and boot it up. Give it about 15 seconds. If you don’t see a boot logo, hit the reset button on top and repeat.
If your console vibrates madly, you messed up renaming the .dtb. Just start over
Step 6: If you already dropped in your legally sourced ROMs and BIOS, you are free to play your games and leave your PC. However, let’s take a tour and see why ROCKNIX is so much better than stock.
ROCKNIX In Action
If you aren’t familiar, ROCKNIX has a user-friendly menu system and prides itself on having very well configured Retroarch, power/over locking options, Retroachivement support, online scraping, Portmaster, and Pico-8 support. It’s a great all-in-one solution for emulation for inexperienced users. You can tell that this configuration is better because booting Kirby Super Star for me has zero frame drops and had imperceivable audio lag (32ms!). For a basic ROCKNIX breakdown, see our friend Adin’s coverage here.
For the Miniloong specifically, you can configure the RGB, brightness, UI sounds, power, display, etc. under System Settings by clicking Start on the home screen. Brightness only seems to have 6 settings and isn’t delegated to a hotkey, so that’s a bit of a blunder here.
But here the Miniloong is also hiding a secret that takes this from a middling budget device to a budget KING for me: The display actually supports 90hz! Under System Settings > Display, set the display to 90.792000hz globally and be amazed. Menu navigation will be notably smoother, input lag is reduced even further, and refresh rate-based micro stutters will be eliminated. Quality stuff here.
Rocknix isn’t perfect on here quite yet though. Along with the lacking brightness options, I’m also getting a glitchy start screen that doesn’t look pleasant at all. Just wait it out, and your console will power on just fine from sleep, but I’d rather this not be there at all.
Second, games still take slightly too long to boot. On 1GB of RAM, I don’t know how much play we have here, but I would love to see this remedied in an update.
Conclusion
And that’s it! A quick one, but a true game changer for someone who was excited about the look and feel of the Miniloong Pocket 1 but absolutely hated playing games on it. Let me know in the comments if you have trouble getting this going! And a special thanks to Ashez and mhdy32 on our Discord for the assist!
At the time of writing this, you can get a MiniLoong for under $70 with our coupon codes, so check out the link below to get your own!
