ROCKNIX RC1 (2026-09-29): cloud sync, offline achievements, Wi-Fi

The first release candidate of the fork's cloud sync, offline achievements and Wi-Fi work, for anyone with an RG35XX SP, an RG SP, a Retroid Pocket Nova or an RG353M who wants to try it before it goes upstream.

What's new

• Cloud storage is set up on the device itself: pick a provider from the list, sign in on the device or with your phone, and the connection is kept only once your provider answers.
• Everything cloud lives in one place, Game Settings > Manage Cloud Storage: back up, restore, the saves toggles and the storage setup, each row saying how it last went.
• Saves sync on their own at startup and after every game, in a few seconds, with a card at the top of the screen that says how it went; offline, the card says so and it tries again next time.
• Backing up or restoring ROMs, BIOS, game content and settings runs on a page of its own that stays until you've read the outcome, and Cancel is the way out while it runs.
• Offline achievements (beta): scan your games once while online, earn casual achievements without a connection, and they're sent to your account the next time you're online.
• The Wi-Fi picker lists the networks around you, remembers the ones you join, and Manage Saved Networks forgets them; the password is typed where the network is chosen.

What's fixed

• A save that changed but kept its size now reaches a plain WebDAV server; before, it never moved again after its first upload while the card read COMPLETED.
• A settings backup never carries a Wi-Fi password or an account sign-in, and restoring one onto a device walks you through entering them again.
• A settings file cut short by a power loss no longer resets the device to defaults: the last good copy is kept and put back.

What to know

• Turning offline achievements on turns hardcore mode off; it's casual achievements only while the beta lasts.

Devices and how to install

• RG35XX SP and RG SP (H700): flash ROCKNIX-H700.aarch64-20260929-DDR4.img.gz for an RG35XX SP and -DDR3.img.gz for an RG SP (those are the two I have; if yours doesn't boot on one, it's the other), then copy your device tree as the H700 page says. To update in place, copy ROCKNIX-H700.aarch64-20260929.tar to /storage/.update and reboot.
• Retroid Pocket Nova (SM8550): ROCKNIX-SM8550.aarch64-20260929.img.gz, or the .tar in /storage/.update.
• RG353M (RK3566): flash ROCKNIX-RK3566.aarch64-20260929-Generic.img.gz (its bootloader detects the RG353 boards; the -Specific image names a device tree for boards it cannot detect), or the .tar in /storage/.update.

Each file has a .sha256 beside it.

Built from, tested on

Two heads. The H700 images are build 8dd6765af0 (fork next at that commit; EmulationStation 014f82685; upstream next at 6b344ab54d and ROCKNIX's EmulationStation master at cada856d8 underneath). The SM8550 and RK3566 images come from 5b5005879e, which adds only the round's records, its documentation, and build fixes for two packages those devices ship and the H700 does not: mangohud and gamescope, whose meson subprojects now come from pinned sources instead of a download at configure (D-WORKFLOW-069, D-WORKFLOW-070).

What was run on 8dd6765af0, on the GENERIC_X64 VM: vm-qa run 72 (fourteen suites; the cloud round trip's size-only step in run 72b after a two-second wait was added to the test), the proofs' run 5 with its 5b and 5c re-runs (37 scripts, 220 checks PASS, 3 FAIL: the E1-pl069 pair, #310, and one line of F2-widgets, #324), the upgrade rehearsal from d39ccdfff3 (RESULT PASS), the offline-achievements test 31 of 32. The H700 tar was staged on an RG35XX SP at 05:47 UTC on 2026-09-29 and the interface came up; the play-through is in progress. The H700 image choice was read from the DRAM regulator on 2026-09-05: vdd-dram at 1.1 V on the RG35XX SP (LPDDR4, the DDR4 image) and 1.2 V on the RG SP (LPDDR3, the DDR3 image); the one update tar carries both bootloaders and picks by the running board. The SM8550 and RK3566 images are built and checksummed and have not run on a device yet.

Issues: #236 (the round), #321 (this release), #322 (the upstream series), #323 (the documentation). The change log is docs/cloud-sync-changelog.md on the fork.

ROCKNIX dev build — 20260827

ROCKNIX dev build — 20260827

One release per build, every device inside it. Flash an .img.gz to a card, or
copy the matching .tar to /storage/.update on a running device and reboot to
update in place without losing settings.

The device reports its build as OS version 20260827 under system information
(20260826 for GENERIC_X64), which is how to confirm what is actually installed.

Device	Hardware	Files
H700	Anbernic RG35XX SP / RG-SP / RG40XX / RG CubeXX …	-DDR3 and -DDR4 variants
RK3566	Anbernic RG353 family	-Generic and -Specific variants
RK3326	Anbernic RG351 family	-a and -b variants
GENERIC_X64	QEMU / UTM virtual machine	.qcow2, .utm.zip, plus launcher and profile

H700 variants are not interchangeable. DDR3 and DDR4 boards need different
u-boot. To tell which you have, from a running device:

for r in /sys/class/regulator/regulator.*/; do
  [ "$(cat "$r/name" 2>/dev/null)" = "vdd-dram" ] && cat "$r/microvolts"
done
# 1200000 -> DDR3    1100000 -> DDR4

Guessing wrong costs a reflash, not the device — u-boot is written to the SD
card, never to internal storage. See issue #44.

What is new in this build

• backuptool backup works again. Upstream dropped the zip package in
  January while backuptool still built its archive with it, so backups had
  failed on every image since. Restored, and declared as a package dependency so
  it cannot silently vanish again.
• A restore no longer wipes the device password. Credentials are stripped
  from backups on purpose; the boot path then applied that empty value across
  SSH, Samba, Syncthing and the file server. It now leaves the existing password
  alone (#46).
• FINISH RESTORE SETUP is clearer — plain state icons instead of alert
  triangles, an explanation under every row, the cloud check hidden unless a
  remote is configured, and LATER now says where to find the page again. That
  page is also reachable without a cloud remote, which it previously was not
  (#47).
• Long dialogs no longer overlap their buttons on small handheld panels (#48).
• Cloud sync uses a /ROCKNIX namespace (Saves, Backups, Content), and the
  system-backup archive round-trips correctly in both directions.

Pre-release: these are development builds for testing, not general use.

RK3566 build — 20260819

ROCKNIX RK3566 build 20260819.

Flash one of these to a card. The variants are not interchangeable — pick the one matching your board:

• ROCKNIX-RK3566.aarch64-20260819-Generic.img.gz
• ROCKNIX-RK3566.aarch64-20260819-Specific.img.gz
  The device reports this build as OS version 20260819 under system information, which is how to confirm what is actually installed.

To update a device already running ROCKNIX without losing settings, copy ROCKNIX-RK3566.aarch64-20260819.tar to /storage/.update and reboot.

RK3326 build — 20260819

ROCKNIX RK3326 build 20260819.

Flash one of these to a card. The variants are not interchangeable — pick the one matching your board:

• ROCKNIX-RK3326.aarch64-20260819-a.img.gz
• ROCKNIX-RK3326.aarch64-20260819-b.img.gz
  The device reports this build as OS version 20260819 under system information, which is how to confirm what is actually installed.

To update a device already running ROCKNIX without losing settings, copy ROCKNIX-RK3326.aarch64-20260819.tar to /storage/.update and reboot.

H700 build — 20260819

ROCKNIX H700 build 20260819.

Flash one of these to a card. The variants are not interchangeable — pick the one matching your board:

• ROCKNIX-H700.aarch64-20260819-DDR3.img.gz
• ROCKNIX-H700.aarch64-20260819-DDR4.img.gz
  The device reports this build as OS version 20260819 under system information, which is how to confirm what is actually installed.

To update a device already running ROCKNIX without losing settings, copy ROCKNIX-H700.aarch64-20260819.tar to /storage/.update and reboot.

GENERIC_X64 build — 20260819

ROCKNIX GENERIC_X64 build 20260819.

• ROCKNIX-GENERIC_X64.x86_64-20260819.utm.zip (recommended on Apple silicon Macs) — unzip and double-click the .utm bundle. It carries the canonical Q35/UEFI, Haswell-v4, 4-vCPU, 8-GiB, VirtIO/512-byte disk, virtio-gpu-gl, network, audio, input, and serial-console configuration.
• ROCKNIX-GENERIC_X64.x86_64-20260819.qcow2 (recommended on Linux) — the same 16-GiB disk. Launch it with projects/ROCKNIX/devices/GENERIC_X64/vm/generic-x64-vm run <qcow2> so Linux uses the same guest-visible machine profile.
• ROCKNIX-GENERIC_X64.x86_64-20260819.img.gz — raw image for flashing or other hypervisors. In a VM, give it a 16G+ disk before first boot and expose 512-byte sectors. On real hardware it resizes to fill the card.

Linux uses KVM acceleration when available; UTM uses QEMU TCG for x86_64 on Apple silicon. The accelerator necessarily differs, but the CPU model and virtual hardware presented to ROCKNIX are defined by the same versioned profile.

2025_02_04 - RK3566 - Generic

Test build for:
Syncthing: 1.29.2
rclone: 1.69.0