WARNING: SOME IMAGES HAS BEEN LOST IN THIS ARTICLE. THEY WILL BE RE-TAKEN AND ADDED IN LATE FEBRUARY. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.
Have you ever found yourself trying to figure out “what handheld should I buy and which one would be perfect for my Amiga and C64 gaming needs” ?
NOTE: Scroll down to the bottom for a speed-run/compressed “how-to”+where to buy.
There are many options out there, and you probably don’t want to buy a bunch of them and then try to investigate which one is the perfect “Commodore” handheld because that will set you back a few hundred dollars. So, in this review, we’re trying to focus on one handheld which we have found to be working amazingly well, is easy to setup and has all the needed functions for gaming on-the-go for a “Commodore head” 🙂
Who are Anbernic ?
In 2017, the ANBERNIC brand was born.
Since the launch of the Retrogame (RG) series, Anbernic has developed and produced a large number of portable game console products, and has received good reviews from customers all over the world with high quality. Especially in recent years, with the development of the open source community, their vision has improved. The goal of the Anbernic brand is to provide retro gaming players and developers in the open source community with smart gaming devices and peripherals that meet the needs of market segmentation.
Anbernic RG351MP: Mint-green edition
Say hello to the Anbernic RG351MP – a metal cased and strongly built device with quality buttons and a bright screen. Since Anbernic is a company who makes quality handhelds in many different shapes and options, we’ve focused on one specific model. It’s the RG351MP as seen in the picture below, because of its ergonomic shape.
DISCLAIMER: Before we start talking about the RG351MP we would like to thank Anbernic for sending us this model to review and their marketing department’s excellent service. This is not a payd review, and is done solely to inform the Amiga and C64 comunity of what we believe is a great product.
This review will cover the following segments:
- The handheld’s specifications.
- What comes in the package.
- Some useful tips for a nice configuration.
- How to easily install Amiga and C64 games.
- UPDATE: Alternative firmware
| Specifications for the RG351MP |
| Rockchip RK3326 @ 1.5Ghz. Mali-G31 GPU. 1GB RAM. 3.5″ IPS Display (640 x 480 – 4:3) 3500mah Battery. Weight: 267g. WiFi (With Dongle) 3.5mm Headphone Jack. |
Please bear in mind that both the C64 and the Amiga are computers, not consoles. This means that they have some special requirements and sometimes uses a keyboard during some games.
The Amiga and the C64 both used the one-firebutton joysticks (even though some had two, they were basically still functioning as the same button) and for that reason we have some games which require the user to hit (for instance) spacebar for certain weapons or to change between weapons. So with this as an example, you should know that this is most probably not going to be a problem for you since almost every game out there was joystick-friendly and didn’t need keyboard interaction from the user. So don’t be afraid 🙂
What’s in the box ?
The console comes in a nice little white box where you will find a USB charger, a memory card with games on it, a wifi dongle (for internet connection when needed) and a screen protector. Personally I have not intalled the screen protector and I probably never will as I like it the way it is. The first thing I noticed when I held the console in my hands is how solid it feels. It’s made of metal and it’s probably for passive cooling so the whole console can second as a heat sink. That said, I have never experienced it to get uncomfortably hot at all.
The buttons feel extremely nice and sturdy and maybe the best thing about it is that when I use it, I don’t hear any of the annoying plastic-squeaky sounds you tend to hear on other hand helds which have plastic casings. This is solid as a rock (or metal if you like) and even though it’s probably adding some grams to its overall wright, it just feels amazing and sits well in your hands.
The shoulder buttons are, in my opinion, a bit too “clicky”. Now, I would like to see a less high-pitched click on future models, but this is just my personal opinion. If you want to play with headphones on and not annoy the person next to you, less clicky shoulder buttons would be a plus. But since we’re focusing on C64 and Amiga, we don’t use them anyway so this is not important in our case.
One thing I would like to share is that to turn it on you have to hold the on/off button in for a few seconds until you get the Anbernic logo. If you have the charging cable connected and you just quickly click the on/off button for a sec, it just shows the battery status for 10 secs and blanks the screen (which is a nice way to see how your battery status is without booting it up). But to actually turn it on (even if you have the carging cable plugged in or not) you need to hold the on/off button in for 2-3 seconds until you see the boot logo.
First time startup and WIFI setup
Whether you bought the version which comes with the extra SD card (filled with 2500+ games) or you did’t you probably want to add your own game-collection and also update it using the WIFI dongle and hook it up to your home network.
So boot up your device – wait for it to be fully booted. Should take max 20 seconds.
Keep in mind – the RG351MP does not have WIFI onboard. You have to use the wifi dongle to go online. But, this is no problem at all, because the only time you need to go online is when you want to run the scraper for box-art and such (which you do only once after adding all your games).
To go online, simply plug the WIFI dongle into the adapter which was provided in the box, then insert it into the OTG-connector on top left hand side. Now click on the “start” button on top right corner of your handheld and you will see the Main Menu
Scroll down to “Network Settings” and and hit the A-button. Scroll down to “Enable WIFI” and hit the A-button once more. Enter yor WIFI SSID and WIFI KEY corresponding to your home WIFI network. Once done you go down to the “Back” button on the bottom of the screen and again hit the A-button.
BEWARE THAT YOU SOMETIMES NEED TO WAIT UP TO 60 SECONDS UNTIL IT CONNECTS, SO BE PATIENT AND WAIT FOR THE CONFIRMATION MESSAGE SAYING “WIFI ENABLED”.
Once it is connected, try to go back into the Network Settings meny once more to check that it has obtained an IP address from your home network’s WIFI router.
Useful tips
Scrapers
When you have added your own game collection to your unit’s SD card you want to have your unit download ALL the nice box art from the internet so that your game selector looks as pretty as it can. So, to do this you have to do two things
First you have to go to screenscraper.fr and create an account. Just open up an account and create a username+password. That’s all. Follow the link below.
Secondly you go into the Main Menu by pressing the “Start” button on the device, and then scroll down to “Scrape” and insert your username+password which you just created on screenscape.fr. This enables the device to login and download all the nice graphics for your games to beautify the game selector screen. It even downloads small animation-previews of the games so you know how a gameplay looks like before you have to start up the game.
You can use the same settings as I have as indicated in the screenshot above – and then go down to “Scrape now” and in the next screen, hit “Start”.
Please bear in mind that if you have installed some hundreds, or thousands, of games — scraping takes a long time and can sometimes run for hours. So install all your games, then run the scaper in the end before going to bed 🙂
PLEASE NOTE: There is a daily restriction so you can only scrape 20.000 games pr. day. So if you game collection is 40.000 games big, you should scrape half of it one day, then the next half the next day 🙂
How to shut down the device properly
Simply press “Select” and go down to shutdown and confirm. This way you are shutting down your device properly. You can also do it the hard way holding the on/off in for a few seconds, but as with all computers — a clean shutdown is always nice 🙂
Themes
I run the ES-THEME-EMUELEC-CARBON on my device and found it to work perfectly and it has a nice Amiga and C64 main screen included which is clean and pretty to look at, but you can of course use whatever theme you like. Themes can be downloaded over WIFI if you go to the main menu, down to “Updates&Downloads”->”Themes” and simply hit the A-button on the themes you want to install.
Let it download and install and you will be able to go into the main menu once more under the “UI Settings” section to see and select your newly downloaded themes. Selecting a new theme requires you to restart EmuElec, so just go to the bottom of the menu and hit Quit. The theme is loaded up automagically within seconds.
File formats for Amiga and C64 games
To make this very short, all you need to know is that C64 games are in .D64 format (disk image files with .d64 extension. For instance “spyhunter.d64”)
Amiga games are in .LHA formats (i know, lha is not a game format, but let’s make it easy for now). Amiga games in .LHA formats are the easiest method to play Amiga games on your RG351MP.
Both the D64 and LHA versions of games are extremely simple to find online, and you can also follow the links in the next section to get it up and running quickly. Once you have downloaded your favourite games and have placed them on your SD card and started up you device, rescanned the gameslist and run thru the scrapers — you are set.
How-to: Finding and installing games for C64 and Amiga
I am not going to cover this to tell you about all the formats out there; instead I will give you two links. One link to download the Amiga games and one link for the C64 games. Easy peasy Atari Squeezy 😉
To download Amiga games:
Simply download your favourite game from the link below:
https://gamesnostalgia.com/whdownload/
Place the downloaded files (which have .lha extensions) into your games folder on your game SD card under the folder called “amiga”. If that folder is NOT there, just create it by hand, but it should be there already.
PLEASE NOTE: You will also need to place your collection of Amiga Kickstart ROMS (sometimes people call them BIOS-files) and place them into the “bios” folder on the SD games card. But on the device I received, the kickstarts were all pre-intsalled in that bios folder. But if you did not buy your device with the included SD games card, you should place your Amiga kickstart files into the “bios” folder on the SD gamecard. This is the same bios folder where all other bios files are placed for the other emulators you wish to use (like “Playstation 1” BIOS files and such).
To download C64 games:
Simply download your favourite game from the link below:
The games are ZIP files and inside the ZIP file are multiple (sometimes) versions of a game. The reason is because there were many groups releasing cracked versions of the same game. So just open the ZIP file and pull out the version of the game (the games are in .d64 file extension) and place the .d64 files under your “c64” folder on the SD games card.
How to transfer the games to the SD card
You can copy the files to your games SD card by either taking the SD card and plugging it into your pc/mac to access the roms folder or you can SCP the files over network to the folder under /storage/roms/<system> where “system” is either “c64” or “amiga”. I prefer to SCP the files so I don’t have to pull the SD card out of the unit every time. But if you are not sure how to SCP, just pull out the 2nd SD card and place it into your computers to copy the roms straight to the SD card.
Novice: Eject the 2nd SD card (the games card) from your device and insert into your computer and copy the games you wish over to the corresponding directory. For instance, place Amiga LHA files inside the “amiga” folder on the SD gamecard. And place the D64 games under the C64 folder on you SD gamecard.
Expert: Just SCP the files from your computer over the network to your device and place the games in the corresponding amiga or c64 folder under /storage/roms.
NOTE: The username + password to SCP into the device is
– username = root
– password = emuelec
Speed-Run HOW-TO for those ONLY interested in the facts.
Only follow this if you are experienced and don’t need the basics.
- Eject the SD memorycard from the device, insert it into your pc/mac.
- Download the WHDLoad-LHA (Amiga) and the D64 (C64) games you want.
- Put the LHA files into the “amiga” folder of the SD gamecard.
- Put the D64 files into the “c64” folder of the SD gamecard.
- Place the Amiga kickstart files into the “bios” folder on the SD gamecard.
- Take the SD card out of the pc/mac, and reinstall it into the RG351MP
- Run the scraper
- Update the gamelist
- Enjoy!
Alternatively, just SCP the files over from your computer to the RG351MP /storage/roms/ folders over wifi.
*UPDATE * UPDATE * UPDATE * UPDATE
I found the C64 emulator not to function with the speed I wanted using the stock firmware which came with the RG351MP, so I ejected both the SD card from the unit (the left SD-card is the “system” card, the right SD-card is the “games” card). I then downloaded the latest 351ELEC-firmware and flashed it onto a brand new 128GB memory card which I had bought, booted it up and it initialised itself, resized itself and after a few minutes it was ready. This firmware is very much the same as the one which came with the RG351MP but it has some advantages when running C64 and Amiga games. Most noticeably on C64 games where I got just 40fps on the stock firmware, but 200fps on the 351ELEC-firmware.
- Download the latest firmware from: https://github.com/351ELEC/351ELEC/releases/tag/20211122
BUT IF YOU ARE LAZY: Download the image file straight from here https://github.com/351ELEC/351ELEC/releases/download/20211122/351ELEC-RG351MP.aarch64-20211122.img.gz
- And watch this YouTube-video on how to install it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOsB3BJ43Xo
BUT IF YOU ARE LAZY: Just flash the IMG file you just downloaded in the link above onto a new SD card and insert into your RG351MP and boot it. Done! 🙂
I installed my 351ELEC by simply downloading the latest IMG file from GitHub and then I flashed it onto my brand new 128GB SD card using ApplePiBaker for my Mac (you can use Win32 Imager if you use windows – of just “dd” if you like on linux). Please note that you DO NOT need to use that second SD card slot on the unit at all, but if you prefer to have a smaller SD card with the operating system on it in the first SD card slot, and a second LARGE games card in the second SD card slot, you can. If you do want to use a small SD card for the 351ELEC operating system and a larger SD card as your games collection, you must format that games card as ExFAT for it to mount.
Personally I just put all my games onto the games partition on the big 128GB SD card which I now use as both my operating system+games card. So my left SD card reader is empty. It’s a matter of preference I guess 🙂
There are a few hints which are nice to know about. When you start a C64 game it often just works out of the box as most games use Joyport2 as default joystick, but some games (like Sammy Lightfoot) use joyport1. To tell your unit to swap joy ports, just click “Select” when in a C64 game and then you get a onscreen-menu where you can swap joystick ports on the fly. Very handy 🙂
Also, if you want to exit your C64 game and go back to the main menu to choose another game, just press Select+Start at the same time TWICE. That takes you straight back — no need to reboot 🙂
You should play around with the main menu by selecting “Select” and the “Start” button to get to know your unit.
It is also nice to know that the A button is what is used in the main game selection menus and B is for “Back” 🙂 But in the Amiga and the C64 games, most games use “B” button as fire. Just a heads up.
Here is how my unit now looks like with the new 351ELEC firmware:
Last words
There are tons of reviews of the RG351MP on youtube which covers all aspects of the device and you should look up those if you are interested in other details which are not covered here. This review is focused on using the Amiga and C64 emulators and how to do so.
Where to buy the RG351MP
The place to go to order the device is www.anbernic.com. They ship very quickly and our sample came with FedEx within a week from China -> Norway.
We would like to thank Anbernic and also their great marketing department for the superb customer service, prompt support and for making this sweet handheld device.
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