Building upon my last two entries regarding gaming on an RG35XX-H on NixOS (which, after receiving various messages from other Anbernic users, are my most popular journal entries to date), I present to you - ricing (a largely unexplored device) with Retroarch and Nix:

Some nice Retroarch menus. I love the snowflake background!

Quickmenu with Pokemon FireRed in the background. And yes, more snowflakes.

The coolest part about this whole setup is that it required no custom frontend or shell. It's LITERALLY just Retroarch. And yet it's so minimal and clean.

I only have Retroarch and rgui to thank for this - the configuration options are immense and give you enough control that you really don't need to patch anything.

Nix allows anyone to configure their Retroarch configuration in just one file. You can adjust what menu items you want, features you need, and more in a highly reproducible environment. Nix is far easier to customize for newbies and experienced users alike. If you want to rice your gaming handheld, I suggest adopting this flake and modifying it so you have easy access to recreate a one-to-one image if your internal SD card were ever to fail (which is common on these devices - please utilize the secondary SD card slot for your game data!)

I took this thing with me on a trip to San Diego. During the flight, I played a little Pokemon FireRed and used the retroarch Bluetooth menu to pair a set of earbuds, which worked great. Honestly the battery life could be better, it drained about 30% in two hours (at half brightness) which could be improved.

Honestly the experience is much smoother than something like ROCKNIX or the default firmware (especially) so I feel pretty accomplished. It's refreshing to experience a snappy, good looking UI instead of slow frontend which just bogs everything down. Let me know your experience with it!