RG351v Notes

The RG351v comes with two memory cards one for the OS and one for your Roms/Bios/Saves. it’s pretty smart! I recommend putting the OS card in a drawer just in case and then taking a clean new 16GB micro SDcard and formating it in exFAT and slapping the 351Elec firmware on to it. MAKE SURE TO GET THE ONE FOR THE 351V Follow this guide:

https://retrogamecorps.com/2021/04/15/rg351v-custom-firmware-guide-351elec-arkos-thera/

This video lays out the info for the newest version of 351elec

Now here’s a bunch of notes as they come to me about my experience so far:

• Grab the big clean bios for 351elec (I’ve been stubborn but this would have saved me a few headaches) Put it in your bios folder on your roms card
• 351elec auto generates all your rom folders when you first put the roms card and turn it on. They are all marked for where to put roms for each system.
• 351elec does support folders so you aren’t stuck slowly scrolling down 4000 roms. I got grabbed some program to auto generate folders by Letter but don’t remember what it is.
• Press Start to bring up menus in the OS
• In Games Menu you can check if you are missing any bios
• In Advance Configuration Per System you can set the emulator per system, shaders, aspect ratio
• 351elec auto selects the correct aspect ratio (but can be easily changed for any system game in menu)
• If you are stuck or frozen in a game You can hit Start + Select + L2 to boot back to the menu. Also for exitting the unreadable built in file manager
• In 351elec, you need to connect to wifi then go download to get drastic for DS support
• You can delete most of the DS games on the rom card since they have heavy stylus support and doubt you want to try playing nintendogs with an analog stick
• But you can get the no-touchscreen hacks for the castlevanias and have a great time
• DOS games require taking the DIS Game Folder, zipping it, and then renaming the extension to gamename.dosz for example Monster Bash becomes Monsterbash.zip becomes Monsterbash.dosz , then placing the file in /pc/
• On the ROM card in the gamedata folder, ScummVM settings are in ScummVm/ScummVM you want to move the settings up one level to get ScummVM working
• ScummVM games go in ScummVM/games/game specific folder/
• there is a whole thing with ScummVM folder names easy but tedious to fix
• ppsspp settings have the same problem and need to be moved from ppsspp/ppsspp/ to /ppsspp/
• x68000 bios want to be in bios/keropi/ for some reason
• the stock rom card CPS1/CPS2/CPS3/FBN/NeoGeo/Capcom games are all mixed up they all point to the same place (Final Burn Neo) so it doesn’t matter outside of organization sake.
• You generally want to set all settings at the 351elec level as opposed to in Retroarch.
• The one thing I did do was change on the appropriate emulators my buttons to Left and Down as opposed to Down and Right. That’s me though. I launched a game for each system (example:NES) brought up Retroarch menu > quick menu > controls > change controls > reassign all controls for this core > save > quit Retroarch
• You want to Quit Retroarch to save your sram/ auto save states
• All systems do auto-save load on quit/start. this can be changed in the per-system configuration or if you hit start over the game in question changed just for that game.

JUST A BREAK FOR YOUR EYES

• Quitting most systems can be done by hitting STart Select twice.
• Retroarch Menu is L3 and R3 (the nub) you might be able to make it just the nub which hey what else are you using the nub for?
• I don’t know can probably make the nub screenshot button that seems good.
• 351elec made a bunch of shortcuts for Select + buttons. that seems like a hassle and will probably turn all of them off.
• there’s a whole video for how to make Amiga games work seems like a pain in the ass
• ZX Spectrum games need to be in a specific format ughhhhh
• Pico8 games are the png, just drop them in the pico-8 folder
• save states are in the save states folder
• SRM files are with the rom
• OpenBoR works through the PSP emulator and is counted as one thing so turn off auto-save/load for that core. Or just delete the whole thing
• Open Beats of Rage is a whole ecosystem to explore to itself
• any FPS is going to be near unplayable but definitely going to be eyeing the 351m for cheap next year for DooM in Bed.