For a good number of years now, there has been inexpensive handheld game emulation consoles coming from China through services such as Aliexpress, Alibaba, Wish, Temu, etc. Among these consoles, one called the SUP M3 Game Box Power (or just M3) is notable for being one of the cheapest if not, the cheapest available option for consumers.
The M3 is special because it can not only be purchased for around $20 usually. My M3 was $20 five years ago and I still see them for that price. I just bought two more brand new and on sale for even less. Out of the box, it is already pretty cool. You get a 3" color backlit TFT with built in speaker and physical button controls. It also utilizes an easy to access and replace lithium battery similarly to a flip phone. It has an AV port for TV output too (not perfect, but acceptable for most games ... not so much text editing).
The one thing that sets these things apart truly is the the addition of an SD card port. Yeah, that's right. You can add your own ROM files! That was great at first and for a while playing games was good enough. After a while I wondered if I could flash a custom Linux firmware to it. Surely enough, I found the Miyoo CFW project.
MiyooCFW Homepage: https://miyoocfw.gznetwork.com/
MiyooCFW Github: https://github.com/TriForceX/MiyooCFW
Without too much tinkering, I was able to flash their firmware to an SD card using RMPrepUSB (works on Windows XP!). All I had to do was insert the SD into the M3 and power on, wait a bit, then power off, then on again. Now, I could see the new firmware and was no longer limited to playing games on fixed emulators. I tried the alpha and both beta versions of Miyoo CFW. I ended up settling on the first beta.
Now my M3 has total commander, terminal (with nano!), music player, and more emulators! The interface used is pretty much the same thing I remember when flashing OpenWRT on my ZipitZ2. Other new features include date and time, USB keyboard/controller support, using the M3 as and HID, and more. The betas are required for AV out.
With all of these new features, it became obvious to try compiling Express Calculator first and then Express BASIC for the Miyoo CFW platform using my M3 for testing. Miyoo CFW is supported on a number of devices. If you want a better device for a little more money try the POWKIDDY V90. I plan on buying a few for us to have here at Lucid Apogee.
My M3 running MiyooCFW shows a 720mhz clock speed in the info bar. That isn't bad for what the thing costs and weighs. It came with emulators for NES, SNES, GBA, SEGA Genesis, and MAME (I think?). MiyooCFW adds Atari consoles!!! AWESOME! But it also emulates PS1... Also AWESOME!! The thing is there's different emulators being ported and they all have their own performances. They all seem to be based on RetroArch.
While the system will run RetroArch stuff, being Linux it will also run .elf files. This makes it possible to run applications such as Express BASIC natively. This took some effort, but ultimately once we followed the recommendations it was easy. Instead of messing with Puppy Linux or Cygwin, we went ahead and used Ubuntu 22.04.
This allowed is to install gcc and make. We had to apply the Miyoo CFW SDK (based on buildroot) and create a make files for each program. We never used make before, just Turbo C, Watcom, etc. It was a bit challenging for that reason. If you're experienced with Linux, gcc, and make then this will probably be easy for you.
We got the programs compiled and have added them to our downloads. You can check it out here:
Express BASIC: https://www.lucidapogee.com/?page=expressbasic
Express Calculator: https://lucidapogee.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=105
Miyoo CFW is GPL and open source. Express BASIC is open source and freeware. M3 and V90 consoles are cheap, powerful, and in production. You can also run other programming languages on these consoles. From what I understand, it is possible to install gcc and make on them. Probably Python too. I also noticed PICO 8 running through RetroArch in my emulators selection.
Check Alibaba for good deals on SUP M3 consoles: https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?sp ... ext=sup+m3
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