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04. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Your moral and emotional support is always appreciated! However, the spruce team does not accept donations. We would ask that you instead donate to your local women's shelter, hug a loved one, or take in a stray animal. Spread the love in this world!
I found a website/store selling handhelds or SD Cards with Spruce pre-installed - is this sold by you?
No, we do not sell pre-loaded spruce cards to anyone. Commercial use of spruce is prohibited without explicit written permission. To get permission email us at thespruceosteam@gmail.com.
This gets asked a lot, and it really comes down to what you want to get out of your device. We are quite proud of the software we have put together, but there are tons of other good options out there too! We are friends with tons of other community software devs and all enjoy using and contributing to one another's projects, so it goes against our philosophy to say that spruce or any one of those is "the best". We recommend you try a wide variety, and stick with the one that brings you personally the most joy!
Yes! We have FFPlay installed for such a thing. Place your music and videos in the Roms/MEDIA folder.
Some supported types:
- Video:
MP4,MKV,AVI,MOV,FLV, and more - Audio:
MP3,WAV,AAC,FLAC,OGG, and more
Spruce has the same limitations as Onion for file sizes and resolutions. Here is a video explaining how to properly compress files.
Yes, as of v3.1.0 spruce includes an over-the-air (OTA) update app. Spruce will, by default, periodically check for updates in the background. If one is found, the name of the OTA app will change from "Check for Updates" to "An Update is Available". Run this to download and install the latest spruce version directly on your device - no computer needed. The OTA app's behavior can be configured in spruce's Network Settings section.
For some reason this isn't actually wired up on the A30. This doesn't provide an input to the device at all. It is only a fidget clicker.
The A30 is really picky with headphones and adapters..... Dan W. from Retro Handhelds wrote a great article on this topic! The Miyoo Mini Flip suffers from the same complications. Make sure you hold onto those dongles that come with the device, if you can help it!
For reasons only Miyoo may know there is a noticeable disparity between A30's in terms of performance. Some devices will be able to run in overclock and do well with higher end systems like DC and PSP... while others will crash or freeze up just from trying to run in overclock mode. There really isn't much we can do as a software/UI modification about this. Some A30's will win or loose the 'chip lottery' and it's beyond our team's control, unfortunately.
As of spruce v4.1.0, spruce defaults to the lowest possible overclock frequency as a safety/compatibility feature for lower-binned A30s. You can experiment with setting higher speeds (which were the old default) under System Settings - but be prepared to bump the setting back down if you did not pull the golden A30.
This seems to vary device to device... most likely also to do with the "chip lottery" mentioned above. So your particular A30 may just run hotter. That said, spruce's default "smart" CPU mode does it's best to balance heat and performance, only ramping up to meet the needs of the current load.
WiFi usage and screen brightness can also have an effect on both battery consumption and heat generation. Having WiFi on increases battery usage to a noticeable degree. (MinUI users often say their A30 runs cooler on MinUI than spruce - disabling WiFi is a big reason why). So if heat/battery is your concern we recommend turning off WiFi. In Spruce v3.0.0 we also introduced a "Turn off WiFi in game" option to help manage that.
Try this Formatting tool on "Quick" mode, then format to FAT32 and install spruce normally. This tool has worked like MAGIC in getting seemingly dead SD cards working again on the A30.
Unfortunately, no. This is hard-coded in the A30's hardware/firmware. Believe us, it drives us crazy too.
No, for some reason the A30 motherboard hates it. If you replace your stick with an 'upgraded' stick like a hall sensor stick we've seen reports of the connection fusing, sparking, and/or melting. We recommend that you DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS! It probably has to do with the way Miyoo wired up the stick in a nonstandard way (see also: no L3 input). All that said, if you took the risk and successfully upgraded your stick... let us know. Perhaps there's a specific kind that would work.
Yes there is. There's a community effort in the MiyooA30 sub reddit to track play ability of higher end systems. (Direct link to sheet) Just as a warning though performance differences from one A30 to another can make it difficult to say the results posted will be your personal experience. (See question above for more details) As a real world example, one person may report Burnout Legends perfectly playable on PPSSPP no tweaking. For another PPSSPP performance might be a slideshow with the same settings. So just keep that in mind.
Netplay works on spruce! You need to turn off auto load and auto save states in the Retroarch menu. On the A30, you also want to make sure you have updated the firmware to fix the wifi issues with the original firmware.
YES! Both Casual and Hardcore modes are supported for emulated consoles that use RetroArch or PPSSPP. For Nintendo DS, the DSperate emulator supports Casual achievements only for now. You can put in your RetroAchievements login info under spruce settings to sign into the service for all supported emulators at once.
Casual achievements can also be earned offline using our built-in implementation of Misantronic's RAOfflineProxy, which is toggleable under that same RetroAchievements settings menu in spruce settings.
As of spruce v4.5.4, we are also pleased to announce spruce's inclusion of the Cheevos app by @abalakh, which allows you to view your RetroAchievement progress for all your games, directly on your device!
In each theme folder there is a "sound" folder, select your and replace the "bgm.mp3" with your own. You must rename the new file to "bgm.mp3"
You can easily copy+paste in themes from the stock MiyooOS or Onion into the "Themes" folder on the root of the microSD card. Onion themes are not 100% compatible with spruce (mostly the app icon names are not aligned), but PyUI is made to adapt them automatically most of the way there.
Since circa spruce v3.0.0, spruce also includes our home-grown Theme Garden app, which allows you to browse and download any of the over 80 different themes from our PyUI-Themes repo - directly over the air to your device.
Spruce's founder Tenlevels got his start as a theme maker. We are always interested in people contributing with new themes!
Spruce includes a suite of apps to manage updates and your files. Two of those are the Spruce Backup app and the Spruce Restore app. These are hidden by default but are used by the update process. So you may have some backups already! Go to Advanced Settings > App Visibility and look for their respective names and hit show. Both apps are a one click run. Spruce Backup will create a backup of all your important spruce related configs and settings and place that on your SD Card in /Saves/spruce/backups. The back up app will keep the last 7 backups in there. To restore just be sure to have a compatible backup file in /Saves/spruce/backups and Restore will restore the most recent backup file, based on the date written in the files name.
Yes! Run the "Bug report" task from the spruce settings menu. If you are connected to wi-fi, this will send us an archive of your logs over the air, and give you a bug report code. Share this code with us with a description of your issue so we know what exactly to look at.
If your device is not connected to wi-fi, you can still run the task to generate a .7z archive of your logs on the root of your SD card to share with us.
If your device will not boot spruce, or you cannot run the bug report task for any other reason, please visit the spruce Discord server for assistance.
you probably have too intenive shaders turned on, turnt them off first tehn retry
Need More Help?
Join our Discord here!
Find us on Reddit at r/MiyooMini
or
DM me at u/SundownerSport! I am happy to help one on one.