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Heavy Emulators and BIOS

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lodordev edited this page Jul 1, 2026 · 2 revisions

Heavy emulators & BIOS

LodorOS's sweet spot is the systems MinUI runs natively (8/16-bit, GB/GBC/GBA, PS1, etc.). Heavier systems — N64, Dreamcast, PSP — are handled per device, and never ship an emulator or BIOS in the release.

H700 (Anbernic rg35xxplus): stock-RetroArch thin shims

On the Anbernic H700 family, LodorOS provides thin-shim paks for N64 / Dreamcast / PSP that run the system on the device's own stock Anbernic RetroArch (under /mnt/vendor/deep/retro/). These paks bundle no emulator, no core, and no BIOS — they only invoke software that already ships on your device — plus LodorOS's RomM save-sync wrapper so saves still round-trip.

  • Requires the stock Anbernic firmware to be present (the card in TF1). If a system's stock core isn't on the device, that system is skipped rather than shown broken (detect-and-direct).
  • You're at the mercy of Anbernic's bundled core versions/quality — this gets you working heavies, not necessarily optimal ones.

Approach credit: ryanmsartor — the technique of shimming the stock vendor RetroArch on H700 devices is theirs; LodorOS's shims are a clean reauthoring that bundle nothing.

BYOB — Bring Your Own BIOS

LodorOS never ships console BIOS or firmware. Systems that require a BIOS won't boot until you supply your own:

  • Dreamcast needs dc_boot.bin + dc_flash.bin. Without them, Dreamcast boots to a BIOS/"no disc" screen. Place them where the emulator expects them (on the H700, the stock RetroArch's system directory / Bios/DC/).
  • Other BIOS-dependent systems: supply the appropriate files to the emulator's system/BIOS directory.

A game that "won't launch" for a BIOS-dependent system is almost always a missing BIOS, not a LodorOS bug — check that first.

Disc formats (Dreamcast/PS1)

Prefer .chd — a single, compressed, self-contained file. It's the most reliable format on a handheld. .gdi/.cue reference separate track files and are easier to get wrong. If a .chd misbehaves specifically on the H700 stock core, that's an old-vendor-core quirk, not a format problem.

Other devices

Heavy-emulator coverage on the non-H700 devices is per-platform and evolving. If a heavy system isn't offered on your device yet, that's expected — the base experience is the MinUI-native library.

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