What is this?
muOS is a custom firmware primarily available for handheld devices. It’s configurable, themeable, friendly and easy to use.
The current supported devices are:
- Anbernic RG28XX
- Anbernic RG34XX
- Anbernic RG34XXSP
- Anbernic RG35XX 2024
- Anbernic RG35XX PLUS
- Anbernic RG35XX H
- Anbernic RG35XX SP
- Anbernic RG40XX H
- Anbernic RG40XX V
- Anbernic RGCUBEXX
- TrimUI Brick
- TrimUI Smart Pro
What you need
You’re going to want two SD cards for this – trust me on this one, muOS is not a custom firmware that thrives on a single SD card as they usually do full releases like this where it overwrites everything, but if you have a second SD card, you can keep all your data, saves, ROMs and all that on your second card so they don’t get wiped.
So I would suggest a 32GB or 64GB card for the operating system card and a 128GB or 256GB card for your ROMs and settings card.
Plus you’ll need a USB SD card reader.
Flashing muOS
Okay, let’s start first with grabbing the latest muOS release from their website, go ahead and download the image. You’ll need to grab the image that matches your device model.
We’re also going to need Rufus to flash this image to your SD card, which you can grab from the Rufus website – the portable version is fine.
Open Rufus, make sure the device listed is your connected SD card to the PC – the OS card if you’re doing two, then click select and choose the image you downloaded from the muOS website.
Then click Start and let it do its thing.
When it’s done, pop that into the OS slot on your device, usually says TF1 and turn on the device.
Choose your timezone, and then if you aren’t going to use WiFi, set the time – otherwise just click B we can get the time using WiFi later.
Formatting second SD card (for those doing two cards)
While that’s happening, for those that want to use two SD cards, we can format that card otherwise one card users can skip this.
Go ahead and connect your second SD card to the PC, and open Rufus.
Make sure the device is your SD card, then choose non bootable for boot selection and make sure file system is exFAT then click Start.
When it’s done, you can eject.
Wait for the device to finish doing the setup it was doing, and making sure you shutdown after that, you can now insert this second SD card into the second slot and turn on the device.
Head to Config then Storage Options and now you can see that pretty much everything is on SD1, our OS card.
So, we want everything to move to SD2, our ROM and settings card.
So, go one by one, push X to migrate, and make sure when you’re done, everything says SD2.
That way, the next time there’s an muOS update, it’ll be super easy for you to keep everything and not delete it all when updating.
Going forward, for two SD card users, anything I talk about will be on your second SD card, so you can safely ignore the first unless I bring it up.
Shutdown the device after you’ve done all that and put your SD card into the PC.
Adding ROMs & BIOS
The ROMS folder is where you put your ROM folders, and you can name them whatever you want.
So, for example, for your Game Boy Advance ROMs, you can create a folder just called gba and then put all your GBA games inside of it – the name doesn’t matter, you can name the folder anything you like.
With the above, they would be in the ROMS/gba folder. Repeat for any other systems you have.
For BIOS files, they go inside of the MUOS/bios folder.
If you’re confused as to what ROMs and bios files are, I have a video on that subject below – but ROMs are games, BIOS files are system files that are required for CD based systems like PS1, Dreamcast and so on. You can see a list of required BIOS files here: Recommended BIOS Files.
muOS Settings
So at this point, you’ve added your ROMs, and your BIOS files, we can jump into settings so pop the SD card back into your device and turn it on.
Launching Games
First, you should know how to launch games – and Content is where you go.
Inside, you’ll see all your ROM folders that you moved over or created, and inside of those are your games.
You can launch a game by just pushing A.
Searching
Now, alternatively, you push Select, you can choose Search, then type in Lookup and choose search global or local to search your entire library of games for whatever you want.
Changing the default emulator or core
Also in this menu, you can see Core, and if you head in there, you can change the core or emulator being used for that specific system or game that you’re in.
So, if we’re in GBA for Game Boy Advance games, I can find GBA in the list, and I can see that it’s set to mGBA by default, but if you want to change that for a specific game or the entire GBA folder, you can do so on this page – the bottom tells you the buttons to push.
Collection
Collection is up next, and let’s go ahead and create a collection called Pokemon.
This will be if you want to create groups of games.
All you need to do is find the game you want to add to a collection in the Content list, push Y, select the Pokemon collection and then A to add. Easy.
History, Info & Apps
History is your history of games.
Info is just information about the firmware and storage space, input tester, that sort of thing.
Apps is where all your apps will be, Dingux commander is a file manager for example, Portmaster and so on.
RetroArch Settings
First, head to Config > General Settings > Advanced Settings > and enable RetroArch Config Freedom.
Then, from the Apps section, let’s open RetroArch.
Head to Settings > Input > Hotkeys and by default the menu button on the device is one combination of your hotkeys, and then Menu toggle is X on the device, Quit is Start, Fast Forward toggle is actually R1, which I hate, so I’m going to remap that to R2. Just simple click Fast Forward toggle and push your R2 button.
I don’t need Slow Motion toggle, so I’m going to push Y to delete it.
Load State and Save State I want to be L1 and R1, so I’m remapping those.
Lastly Show FPS is Y.
Back out and if you want, head to Achievements and sign in with your RetroAchievements login.
Back out and go to Configuration File, Save Current Configuration to save your changes and then Quit.
Config
Head to Config and then General Settings.
You can adjust brightness, volume, color temperature and the device startup here.
Device startup being what do you want the device to boot into, maybe you want it to jump right into the last game you were playing, that sort of thing.
You can also control the brightness with the menu button and volume buttons together as a hotkey.
Wait for WiFi for RetroAchievements
Advance Settings has a bunch of stuff I don’t usually touch, but I would enable RetroArch Network Wait, which tells the device to wait to connect to the network before booting a game which helps for RetroAchievements users – otherwise won’t matter for others.
Connectivity
Head to Connectivity next and go ahead and connect to WiFi now if you like.
Note: RetroAchievement users should use Static IP addresses as it cuts down the WiFi loading time by a big amount.
With WiFi, you can setup Syncthing, and remote file access and all sorts of fun stuff under web services.
Themes
Back out and into Customization, and you can see Theme Picker here.
There’s a Theme Downloader that you can use to see all of the themes available for your device, and download them to be used.
Interface & Power Options
Back out and into Interface Options and I like enabling Network to see the network icon to know I’m connected in the top right.
Power settings will show you what’s current set for sleep mode and all of that.
And that’s it from a settings perspective.
Scrappy – For Box Art
Now, we can finally look at Box Art.
muOS still doesn’t have built in scraping, however, an app called Scrappy lets us do it.
Download the muxapp file from the latest release.
Connect your SD card to the PC, the second SD card with your data on it if you have two, and put this file into the ARCHIVE folder.
Go ahead and boot up the device, head to Apps > Archive Manager and select the file.
After that’s done, head to Applications and then Scrappy.
Go ahead and push select and login with your Screenscraper login.
If you don’t have a login, I’d suggest you get one or you will likely hit the scraping limit quickly for free users.
You can also see the systems list at the bottom and I’d suggest doing one system a day or something as it can take a very long time to scrape.
Back on the main Scrappy screen. You can see a preview of what the box art will look like on the top left, go ahead and click start scraping to start the process.