The Powkiddy V10 is only one of a few devices that are made almost specifically for the GBA. With its 3:2 screen at 480 x 320 resolution, it’s the perfect device for playing GBA at 2x integer scaling.

However, the device is a worthwhile device for numerous other retro consoles up to lightweight PS1 titles. If you’re fine with pillar and letterboxing on those consoles, while getting perfect integer scaling on GBA, it may be the perfect device for you.

This guide aims to be the end-all-be-all of V10 setup guides. There are graphs, illustrations, instructions, and LISTS, and I take you through the entire process from start to finish as if you’ve never used a computer before. Strap in, bucko, this one is an ultimate.

Table of Contents

• Getting Started
• Recommended Accessories
  • Backup your SD Card
• Fresh Install ArkOS
  • What You’ll Need
  • Download and Extraction
    • Windows users
• Flashing ArkOS onto an SD card
  • Win32DiskImager (Windows)
  • Balena Etcher (macOS)
  • Terminal (macOS) and alternatives for Windows
• Using ArkOS on the V10
  • Using RetroArch
    • Hotkeys
    • Hotkeys Remix (ft. Ludacris)
    • Button Remapping
• Adding More Games
  • ROM File Extensions
  • BIOS Files
  • BIOS File Names
  • Refresh Game List
• Connecting to WiFi and Updating
• Wrap-Up

Powkiddy V10 Specifications

Buy the Powkiddy V10

Getting Started

The bulk of this guide is going to walk you through how to use ArkOS, RetroArch, Emulation Station, and where to place files. For a good portion of it, you may need a computer.

You only need a computer to add games, BIOS files, or to fully reinstall ArkOS on your SD card. For everything else, like remapping buttons or setting up hotkeys, you do that directly on the V10.

Recommended Accessories

As far as accessories go, it’s pretty slim. When you initially get your V10, it should be in fine working order, but if you want to make sure you’re prepared for anything, or set up from scratch, these are the recommended accessories.

• • MicroSD card
  • Wi-Fi dongle
    • Needed for ArkOS online updates. The V10 by default only supports WiFi via an external dongle connected via USB-C.
  • USB to USB-C adapter
    • USB-C Wi-Fi dongles are hard to come by. Save money with a standard USB one and an adapter.

Micro SD Cards

• • Micro Center MicroSDXC (16GB – 2565GB)
  • SanDisk Ultra (32GB – 1.5TB)
  • Samsung PRO Plus (512GB)
  • Silicon Power Superior (1TB)
  • SanDisk Extreme (1TB)

SD Card Readers

• • UGREEN 2-in-1 SD Card Reader
  • Anker PowerExpand+ 2-in-1
  • uni USB-C SD 4.0 Card Reader

Wi-Fi Dongles

• • TP-Link AC1300 USB Wi-Fi Adapter
  • TP-Link Nano AC600 USB Wi-Fi Adapter
  • USB Wi-Fi Adapter

USB to USB-C adapter

• • Anker USB-C Adapter (2-Pack)

Backup your SD Card

Most if not all retro handhelds come with some form of an included micro SD card. The V10 is no different, but as with a lot of single SD card devices, it’s partitioned into two drives. These two drives are BOOT and EASYROMS.

If you want to backup the data alone, any games you have, scraped artwork, backup the EASYROMS partition. You can do this by opening the EASYROMS partition and dragging all of the enclosed folders to a new folder on your desktop, or some cloud storage platform like Google Drive or Dropbox.

Fresh Install ArkOS

If you want to start from scratch, I would recommend getting a dedicated SD card and flashing ArkOS to it. Then move your content into their respective folders.

What You’ll Need

• • macOS or Windows PC
  • Larger than 8GB Micro SD card
  • SD card reader
    • Your computer may have a built-in SD card reader, or you’ll need to use a USB SD card reader. 
  • ArkOS image for V10
    • Download size is 3GB but full uncompressed size is 8GB.
  • 7-zip (Windows)
  • Win32DiskImager (Windows)
  • Balena Etcher (macOS)

Download and Extraction

Clicking the “ArkOS image for V10” link above will take you to the ArkOS GitHub wiki. Scroll a decent way down the page until you see the Download Links section.  You want the one that mentions V10 in its name. They offer a Google Drive and a MEGA link, but the downloads are the same. Pick whichever one you’re more comfortable with.

V10 in the title, seems right to me.

For Windows users, read this excerpt from our D007 AmberELEC installation guide on how to install 7-zip and properly extract the .img file from the .xz. When reading below, replace AmberELEC with ArkOS and .gz with .xz.

macOS users, scroll to the bottom of this section.

Windows users

Sadly, Windows does not natively support opening .gz files. So, we’ll need to use the most handy of all tools, 7-zip, to open and extract the .img inside.

7-zip has different downloads for different types of systems. On your computer, you can hit the Windows Start button, the little Windows logo in the bottom left, and immediately start typing the word “about” on your keyboard.

You’ll be presented with something like the screenshot above. select the About your PC option at the top to see a screen similar to the one below. From there, you can pinpoint which type of system you have and which download you’ll need.

• Once it’s downloaded, double-click the .exe and follow the installation prompts.
• Right-click the AmberELEC img.gz file you downloaded earlier and you should see a new 7-Zip option in the right-click menu.
• Highlight it, and then select the option Extract Here. This will extract the .img from the .gz file and put it in the exact same location.

For macOS users, double-click the .xz and it will extract the .img to the same location.

Flashing ArkOS onto an SD card

Flashing the image is a mostly easy process. For those on macOS, download Balena Etcher from the What You’ll Need section above. Windows users, grab Win32DiskImager from the same list.

Ironically, although the developers of ArkOS suggest not using Balena Etcher and using ApplePi Baker instead, I have had no success with ApplePi Baker across three different Mac systems. Balena Etcher worked as it should have on all three.

And since we’ll be utilizing the same programs, let’s get another excerpt from the same guide to detail how to flash the image on both Windows and macOS.

Same as above, when reading below, replace AmberELEC with ArkOS.

Win32DiskImager (Windows)

You’ll need to flash the image onto your SD card. That can sound daunting, but the process has been made incredibly simple and only requires a few clicks only a button with an app.

• Download the app Win32DiskImager. It’s the easiest and most straightforward option on Windows.
• In the Image File selector, click the blue folder icon and find the .img file that was extracted from the img.gz file downloaded earlier.
• In the Device selector, click the dropdown arrow and choose your SD card. It should have the same drive letter as what was shown in the Format menu from Step 2.
• Hit Write. You should see a progressing green bar near the bottom of the window. Your app will look similar to mine, as shown below.

If everything was successful, the program should show a simple popup screen alerting you that the writing of the card was successful.

Balena Etcher (macOS)

Download the app Balena Etcher. Like Win32DiskImager for Windows, this is the least complicated app available for flashing.

• Open the app, click Flash from file, and locate the .img file that was extracted from the downloaded img.gz file from earlier.
• Click Target and choose your SD card.

• Hit Flash. A screen will pop up asking you for your password, so go ahead and oblige and hit Ok. On the left side of the Balena Etcher window, you should see a progressing purple bar if everything was done correctly.

• Put the SD card into your V10 and you should be greeted by the ArkOS logo, a flash of terminal commands being run, a flashing underscore, and then a barrage of terminal commands — in that order.

Should look similar to this, garbled and insanely fast

Terminal (macOS) and alternatives for Windows

For this section, I’m going to be as brief as possible. If you know how to use Terminal already, then you should know a lot of the in-between.

On your computer, you need to run the dd command and set its parameters to your drive and the download file. The command you will run is:

sudo dd if=[image location] of=[SD card location] bs=4M status=progress && sync

It will ask for your password (as it is a super user command — super user do, sudo), and then the process will begin.

For me, Shawn, on a Mac, my image location would be /Users/shawn/Downloads/ArkOS_RGB10_v2.0_09​292024.img and my SD card location would be /dev/disk6. Both of these will be different for you.

My resulting command would be “sudo dd if=/Users/shawn/Downloads/ArkOS_RGB10_v2.0_09292024.img of=/dev/disk6 bs=4M status=progress && sync” but again, will be different for you.

You can find your disk by running “diskutil list” in Terminal. You need to put the entire disk in the command, not the partition. Use the image below for reference.

On Windows, running dd is a far more complicated and outdated process than running a simple command. If you have trouble flashing the image to your SD card, try to use other apps like Rufus, the Windows version of Balena Etcher, or Raspberry Pi Imager.

If you need detailed instructions on these programs, Nick has you covered in his R36S setup guide.

Using ArkOS on the V10

Before diving into the OS, we should take a quick look at the buttons on the device and make sure we understand them all.

If you ever need to reset the entire device, there is a small R button right next to the power button.

And, as odd as it may seem, to fully shut down your device, you need to exit the game you’re playing, return to Emulation Station, then press Start > Quit > Shutdown.

Pressing power during gameplay puts the handheld into sleep mode, and holding power for around 5 – 10 seconds will force a shutdown — something I never typically recommend.

Along the top of the device, there are two USB-C ports. The leftmost one is for charging, and the right one is for the OTG port. This port can be used for external storage, a wifi dongle, or a Bluetooth audio adapter.

On the face of the device, there is your standard quad-button quad-directional controller layout — like the SNES. However, they’ve added two new buttons, plus and minus ones in the top right and top left, respectively.

Powkiddy calls the minus key “select” in their documentation, but y’know what, they’re just wrong. I will refer to them as plus and minus.

And finally, on the bottom of the V10 is a single SD card slot paired with the device’s 3.5 auxiliary port (headphone jack).

Using RetroArch

ArkOS relies on RetroArch and its cores for emulation. For the most part, it’s the exact same deal here as it is on numerous other retro handhelds, but it’s always good to see a concrete list of actions.

Hotkeys

When you boot your V10, you’ll be presented with a carousel of consoles that have content in their respective shorthand folder (more on this later) but once you choose a game, you’ll be thrown into RetroArch.
RetroArch uses hotkeys; buttons you press to make specific things happen. Here’s a quick list of the most important ones:

• Open Quick Menu: Minus + X
• or L1 + R1 + Start + Select
• Screenshot: Minus + Y
• Reset Game: Minus + B
• Pause Emulation: Minus + A
• Save State in current slot: Minus + R1
• Load State in current slot: Minus + L1 

• Volume Up: Plus + Right
• Volume Down: Plus + Left
• Brightness Up: Plus + Up
• Brightness Down: Plus + Down

Hotkeys Remix (ft. Ludacris)

RetroArch, on all consoles, has support for hotkeys. The above are the same thing — hotkeys — but those are maybe the most important ones. For all of my devices, I like to enable fast-forward at the very least. It removes the mundane aspects of certain RPGs and makes them, in my opinion, easier to enjoy.

We can also do more edits and add all kinds of fancy fun things.

1. On your device, open a game, and then open the Quick Menu.
2. Tap B until you see a list that starts with Quick Menu.
3. Go to Settings > Input > Hotkeys.

Here, you can find all sorts of hotkeys to enable, disable, or customize with your own button of choice. Pressing the Y button on any of these options will nullify it, or remove it. You’ll know it’s successful if it changes to —.

Your default hotkey enable key is set to “Button 13” which is the minus key we discussed earlier. This means, that to utilize any of the hotkeys you have listed, the Minus button has to be pressed as well. It’s why most of those listed above require the Minus key. I think you get it.

Here are the tweaks I make on my personal device.

• Fast Forward (Toggle): Minus + R2
• Fast Forward (Hold): —
• Rewind: Minus + L2

I don’t mess with anything else, generally. The V10 as I use it is more refined when looking at it as a GBA console exclusively, but it doesn’t need or have to stop there. If you want to play other games, you damn well can.

And that’s where button remapping comes into play.

Button Remapping

Let’s head all the way back to the Main Menu, the menu that had Quick Menu at the top. From here, go to Quick Menu > Controls > Port 1 Controls.

You can edit these to your liking, but if you mess up, you may be in a world of hurt because you for some reason made the A button the Y button but never set a B button up. It can happen.

These can be configured to only be active on a system-by-system basis.

Once you’re done setting your button remaps, head to the Quick Menu and then hit Overrides > Save Content Directory Overrides. This will make it so all games in whichever folder your games are stored (an entire console) will follow these remapped buttons. This can be useful if you want to dedicate some other buttons to one of the six found on a Sega Genesis, for example.

Adding More Games

How and wherever you obtain your games between you and God. We will not, cannot, and never will help you obtain ROMs in any form or fashion.

Adding games to your console is a typically easy process. Regardless of if you’re on Windows or macOS, the instructions are exactly the same.

For this guide, I am using Zook Man ZX4, a Chinese bootleg game heavily inspired by the Mega Man games on the SNES.

When you plug your device’s SD card into your computer, you’ll see two different partitions/drives. One is called EASYROMS and one is called BOOT. You want to open the EASYROMS one.

You’ll see a huge collection of folders with shorthand names for their respective consoles, similar to those below.

Even on Windows, you will see the same exact folders.

Since, for this example, I’m using a game ripped from a GBA cart, I need to put its correlating .gba file into the gba folder. Sounds simple because it is.

That sure is a thing in a folder.

So, looking at this naturally, should I acquire any more .gba files, they would also all go into this gba folder. You do the same for each and every console you have games for.

For example, if you have PrinceBanana2.gen, I could look at the extension and deduce that it’s a Genesis game. Therefore, I’d plop that file into the aptly named genesis folder.

Using the Zook Man ZX4 example still, once you start playing the game, making save states, taking screenshots, and saving genuine saves, it will all be in the same folder alongside the game itself — like so.

3 screenshots, 1 game, 1 save, 2 save states, and a partridge in a pear tree.

For reference, here are a few common file types for various different systems.

ROM File Extensions

Any of these games go in their respective shorthand folders. Some folders may have names that differ from their extension, but if you don’t see one named after the extension, it is most likely named after the console.

For example, there is no gen folder, but there is a genesis one.

BIOS Files

Just like the ROMs above, we will not, cannot, and never will help you in your quest for BIOS files.

In that same EASYROMS partition discussed above, you will find a bios folder amongst all of the other shorthand folders for your games. Simply drag and drop your BIOS files here.

Be aware, you may not need BIOS files at all. If either a game or an entire console if giving you problems, then you may need them. But outside of that, you should be groovy.

BIOS files should have standardized names. Meaning, that the names of the files listed below should not be any different on your SD card.

BIOS files go in this folder. Directly in this folder.

In this folder, you can see I have the Genesis files placed directly within. You only need to put them in folders when it’s one of those consoles with pre-made folders. For everything else, plop it in the bios folder.

Here, have another list.

BIOS File Names

Like the potential ROM extension list above, think of this list as a master list. The V10’s RK3326 chip is only powerful enough to play up to lightweight PS1 games, so there should be no reason you’re putting the PS2 BIOS files on the same SD card.

Refresh Game List

You typically shouldn’t be in this predicament since the V10 runs off a single SD card that you’d have to remove to add games to it, but should you ever need to refresh your game list, it’s a simple process.

While in Emulation Station, the carousel discussed earlier, hit Start > Quit > Restart EmulationStation. Again, you should never be in this situation, but if you find yourself adding games and they don’t show up when you boot your V10 up, start here.

Connecting to Wi-Fi and Updating

Updating can either be a hassle or a stroll through the park. If you did not opt for the Wi-Fi dongle and USB-C adapter, you’ll have to follow the Backup your SD card section and reflash the newest ArkOS image to it every time you want to update.

If you did opt in for the Wi-Fi dongle, be sure you’re in EmulationStation, and scroll past all of the consoles until you see Options. Scroll to the bottom of that list and hit Wi-Fi.

This will open up an old-school DOS-looking program, the first option being Connect to a Wi-Fi network. Hit that and connect to your Wi-Fi network.

Go back to the main menu and press Select + Start to exit the app.

From here, go back to Options, scroll down to Update, and follow the prompts to update. It will check to see if an update is available and, if so, it will update.

Wrap-Up

The V10 is a perfect little device for those of us who mainly explore this hobby to find out which device plays GBA the best.

“Best” is an operative word most times, but there are only a few variables to work with. Does it play well, are the controls at least decent, is the OS competent, does it offer integer scaling, etc? For the V10, the answer to all of this is a resounding yes when it comes to GBA games.

The capabilities of this device stretch far beyond and before, too, however. Although it features an odd aspect ratio only used by one handheld released in 2001, retro games ranging all the way up to PS1 and handheld ones up to PSP can still be played.

Hopefully, this guide not only helps you utilize your V10 but also helps you understand how it works, too. Understanding the core bits of retro handhelds is how we ensure the hobby continues to grow. The more we know about them, the more confident we become in sharing them with others.

What did you think of this guide? Do you have a V10? What’s your favorite game to play on it? Let us know in the comments below, and chat with us in our Discord!

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