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Powkiddy RGB20s Guide

11 min read

Credits

This whole article is copied from this reddit post

Late comer to the game. I just got a new RGB20S. (It’s now working fine.) It had all THREE of the major issues that I’ve seen described in the forum — powered on to just the “voltage” message screen, a corrupted OS card, AND I had a lot of drift in the left joystick. My unit actually had gone through Amazon returns, and I expect any one or all three problems were the reason. My experience may be a good guide for anyone having issues with an RGB20S…

First, a couple of simple notes for getting started with your (new) RGB20S.

You’ll want to start by making sure your system is charged. When it is charging, the light in the middle of its smile will turn bright red. If it doesn’t turn red, or is light yellow, your cable and/or charger aren’t quite the ones it needs.

There are a couple of charging gotchas. Even though it’s a USB-C charging port, it’s a really dumb port. You can’t charge your RGB20S with a USB-C to USB-C cable, or a USB-C PD (Power Delivery) charger. Use the included USB-A to USB-C charger (or one just like it) and a cheap USB-A wall brick as a charger. If you connect it and the light doesn’t turn red, try a different cable and then a different charger. I went through several of mine before I found combinations that worked.

The Power Button is the top button on the left. Below it is a reset button. The Power Button turns the system on, and puts it to sleep. The Reset button reboots the device — something that you want to do as little as possible! (Actually turning the RGB20S off is a bit trickier… again, something you shouldn’t have to do too often.)

When you turn your RGB20S on, it actually boots Linux and launches a program called “EmulationStation” that presents you with an interface to help you find and launch your games. There are a number of guides to EmulationStation that you can find on the internet. But you can skip them and just jump into trying to enjoy it.

The systems and games displayed for you will depend on the ROMS that shipped with your system, or that you — as the experienced retrogamer — have collected and added to your microSD card. Most sellers of the RGB20S offer several different sizes of microSD cards loaded with ROMS for older game systems (of questionable legality, since they are almost certainly licensed by the copyright owners…).

You select a game system, and then a game, by scrolling up and down in the menu and pressing A when you have your choice highlighted. (If you need to back to a previous menu, press B instead.)

When you select a game, the emulator for the game system will launch and (usually) start the game itself. The controls inside a game depend on the game system (“core”) that runs the game.

Perhaps the most important keypress to know is Select + Start, Pressing both of these buttons at the same time will exit a running game and get you back to the games menu. It will also usually exit a crashed game, making pressing that reset button less necessary.

There are lots of other options and choices that you can make — but this is enough to get you into a game, let you play it, and get back to the EmulationStation menu to choose a different game.

Now, it’s time to enjoy your new console!

(At least until something corrupts your Operating System microSD card. Which apparently happens really easily, especially with the cards included by the sellers… Read on below for a guide of how to fix it if/when that happens.)

That all assumes that your RGB20S is working well enough to get to the games menu. Mine was not.

To fix mine, I needed:

The online consensus is that charging your RGB20S for about four hours on a working charger will fix a multitude of problems. It didn’t fix all of mine, but your mileage may vary.

Low Voltage Screen / Getting Charged for the First Time

The low voltage message is apparently common when the battery is almost dead in the RGB20s. The message appears about a third of the way down the screen, is tiny, hard to read, and may not stay on very long. It looks like some simply corrupted text at first glance.

The charging cable was missing from my box (but one of the stickers was there… go figure.) So I hooked it up to a USB-C Power Delivery charger, expecting that would be the best choice. Nothing happened. To be specific, the power/charging light remained light yellow/orange. Let it charge 4-6 hours, no change.

Switched to a simple USB-A to USB-C cable connected to a standard “dumb” charger. The power light changed to bright red immediately. I was in business. Let it charge for a couple of hours before pressing the power button — didn’t want to press my luck.

Turned it on, and no longer got the low voltage message.

When Your RGB20S Turns on But Doesn’t Get to the Games Menu

Now I got to a screen that said “RGB Gaming” and it went no further. Shoot. Feared I had gotten a unit that was indeed broken.

A bit of research suggested that the microSD card was probably corrupted. And that the PowKiddy RGB20S is pretty much a complete clone of the Ambernic RG351MP and can run the same firmware. So I downloaded it.

Before going any further, I made a backup of the ROMS microSD card in the left slot. That took a long time, since mine had the 128GB card. (So far, this card hasn’t failed, but I’m not holding my breath!) Windows can read the games card without any problem, so you can just copy it to a hard disk…

Installing New Firmware / Operating System on the RGB20S

Installing the RG351MP ArkOS image to an SD card wasn’t TOO bad… but it wasn’t 100% obvious, either. The consensus is that you shouldn’t trust the microSD card that shipped with an OS in your RGB20S. Mine was the oft-described “blue” generic 16GB card, which I replaced with a SanDisk 32 GB card.

My Personal Note:

If you are also replacing your games SD card, make sure you format it to Fat, Fat32, EXT4 or NTFS

And if you do this correctly but still get the error, try another SD like this user suggests under this post with the same issue

Here’s the (rough) steps on Windows:

  1. Download the ArkOS image for the RG351MP from https://github.com/christianhaitian/arkos/wiki

  2. Use 7zip to extract the .XZ file you just downloaded. (This is a compression format that’s used mostly on Linux, and 7-zip knows how to handle it. After you’ve installed 7-zip, you can use Windows to browse to your downloads folder, right click on the .XZ file, choose 7-zip → Extract here in the context menu.) Inside the .XZ file is a .IMG file that you will use to create your bootable microSD card.

  3. Insert a 16GB or larger microUSB card into your computer.

  4. Unzip and launch USB Image Tool from https://www.alexpage.de/usb-image-tool/

My Personal Note:

In Ubuntu (Linux), open file manager and right click your .xz and select “Open with disk image writer”

  1. Select your microUSB card in the device list on the left.

  2. Choose “Restore”. Browse to and select the .IMG file that was in the ArkOS zip file. Confirm that you want to overwrite your microUSB card and wait for it to finish.

Once the ArkOS image is written to your microSD card, you are ready to place it in your RGB20S and turn it on.

The initial boot process for the ArkOS image takes a very long time. You will think something is broken, but wait patiently. The length of time depends on the size of the USB card you are using. It will restart your device several times. Eventually, it will finish resizing its partitions, configuring Emulation Station, and boot to what looks like a game menu.

My Personal Note:

You should see a lot and a lot of text in your screen for at least a minute or so, text that is constantly scrolling by. Cause my first attempt was just a black screen, and that was not the hoped result.

If it goes to a constant black screen after it says that it’ll reboot, wait like 10m to be sure. But you can press the reset button if it is still a black screen.

At this point, you’re RGB20S should have successfully booted, and is at the EmulationStation menu where you expect to find your games. But if, like me, you have the “normal” RGB20S setup, your games are on the other microSD card in the left-hand slot.

You’ll need to tell EmulationStation to look for ROMS on SD Card 2.

To do this, scroll up / down through the list of systems until you come to the “Options” choice. Press the A button. You should be on the “Advanced” menu choice. Press button A again. Scroll down until the “SWITCH TO SD2 FOR ROMS” choice is highlighted. Again, press button A.

This will take a couple of moments, and the screen will say that it’s creating a swap file, scanning directories, and then return to the EmulationStation menu.

If everything works right, you’ll find yourself at the systems menu screen — probably at the “Arcade Classics” games group. My microSD card had 178 games available in this category — yours will vary.

And Now My Controller “Drifted”

Even though my RGB20S was now booting — and running games successfully, it sometimes acted like I was pressing the downward direction on the left joystick. Gamers often describe this as “drift”.

Longer story below --- I eventually took the six screws out of the back of my RGB20S and took the back cover off. The battery’s on the back, connected with a single cable (which should make replacing the battery later an easy option!)

After disconnecting the battery, I noticed that the ribbon cable to my left joystick was loose. I put it back in place, put it back together, and my system was fine!

I noticed this immediately in the menus — if I pressed down on the joystick, it would keep scrolling long after I let go of it. Pressing the joystick in another direction made it stop, and using the d-pad worked fine. (Remarkably, in games it seemed to work just fine.)

I thought it might be sticky or dirty, so I tried blowing it out with canned air.

In case anyone else has this happen, the latches are the little black part at the back of the connectors and flip up to let you pull out or insert the plastic ribbon cable (for both the left and right sticks). The traces on the plastic ribbon face upwards when you are looking at the back of the board, and there’s a fair bit of exposed trace when the connectors are latched.

Enjoying the RGB20S

The RGB20S definitely attracts attention with its bright screen and fun button arrangement. I haven’t spent more than a few hours with mine now that it (appears) to be working right. I can tell already, though, it’s going to be my favorite handheld. And it appears to be easy to maintain, too.

Hopefully this will help someone else who gets a new RGB20S — or has problems with theirs!

Thanks,

albert

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