#tried a new action for gifs and tbh i like it heheh

[b0bbynash]

[notreblogs]

Customization of my GPD XD so far~

 I installed LegacyRom and TWRP recovery following the guide right here. Instantly got rid of all the chinese bloatware, got root, and now have all stock goodness.

Installed TVLauncher and made some customized tiles/icons/banners for it (Even paid for the ad-free version because it’s just so nice~).

I installed the XPosed framework, to fine tune some stuff. The installation was quick and easy~ I installed the following modules:

APM+ to add a reboot option to the power menu (Because Android kit kat only has shutdown/airplane/silent options by default, and no reboot option)

Youtube AdAway, self explanatory adblocker.

Youtube Background Playback, which allows you to close the lid/minimize youtube and the audio will still be playing in the background (It’s a youtube RED functionality, but without it lol)

Forced Screen Rotation mod, because TVLauncher turns upside down if you flip the thing over, even when automatic rotation is disabled ^^;. This module though, allows you to LOCK the rotation by faking the accelerometer sensor data. You can whitelist some apps if you want to still use the accelerometer.

The emulators i’m using are johns lite emulators (GBC, GBA, NES, SNES) cuz I like the selector and it’s consistent, MD.emu, DraStic, ePSXe, MAME4droid (Uses MAME 2010 romset), mupen64+, yabause (Yaba Sanshiro), PPSSPP (A lot of games run at full speed), reicast (Dreamcast emulation has come a long way and most games run at full speed!), Ataroid, Turbo Dosbox, and VirtualJaguar (Not full speed but I like the jaguar as the weird little thing it is). They all have gamepad support!

Some of them are paid apps but trust me it’s worth paying most of the cases heh. I bought Turbo Dosbox, DraStic, and ePSXe long ago and it’s been worth it.

Yeah I still hate retroarch. Tried it once again, and although the menu seems slightly more maneuverable, sorry ^^; ...still added it for completeness sake, and just in case, but could get rid of it at any moment. I don’t really care that it’s free, It’s just my opinion but I prefer to have my stuff separated and I like to have many icons on the screen. But first and most importantly I like it the way things are now and I’m not willing to change just “because retroarch”.

I can live without picodrive’s 32x emulation anyways...

Alright, now onto Android games. The Sonic android ports are lovely and have native gamepad support, same as Minecraft, Virtua Tennis (?), and an android port of GZDoom (Which isn’t on the play store as far as I know).

Re-Volt, Rayman and F1 2016 (Found a modded version to make it work on android Kit Kat) don’t have gamepad support BUT the GPD-XD Mapper allows you to map physical buttons to touchscreen controls so you can virtually play any game that has on-screen joystick controls.

Also there’s my own games Tunnel Runner Redux (which has full gamepad support in-game, even strafing with the shoulder buttons heheh) and OuO (which doesn’t use the gamepad at all but it’s cute)

TVLauncher supports adding web bookmarks as well, so I’ve added some bookmarks to sites, alongside all the other apps I’ve installed (twitter, tumblr, chrome, it’s not really better than on the phone, but I like to have em it looks neat and this thing has 32 gigabytes of internal storage memory, that’s enough room for everything hhaha)

I heavily recommend getting most of Simple Mobile Apps, they’re ad-free and they do just what you need. Clock, File Browser, Image Gallery, Music Player, and other stuff.

Anyway, so far I’m still in love with this thing. Zero disappointments, and everything works just as I expected and even better. <33

If you guys know of any cool gamepad-ready android games I should try (or action-oriented, you know, arcade style or that are played with on-screen controls heh) let me know!

Here’s a bunch of things to note if you’re considering getting one (Putting them under the ReadMore because this post is already too long!):

Ok so:

The GPD XD model I have is the one with 32GB of internal memory.

It doesn’t have bluetooth (The newest GPD XD+ “plus” revision does have bluetooth though, along with more RAM; that makes it a bit more expensive than the “old” 2017 model)

It doesn’t have a GPS.

It doesn’t have a light/proximity sensor, so automatic brightness doesn’t work.

It doesn’t have a Camera.

It does have an accelerometer but it doesn’t have a gyroscope, or a magnetic field sensor. So essentially any game that requires turning the device “around” (cardinal directions) won’t work.

It doesn’t have a SIM card slot.

Basically it doesn’t have any pointless hardware so that you don’t have to pay for what you don’t need. It is an emulation-oriented-handheld after all.

It does have a microphone though. And stereo speakers, in front of the device.

The accelerometer is located at the bottom half of the device, and not at the top half. Keep that in mind when playing tilt-controlled games!

The thumbsticks are really analogue joysticks and they feel quite nice, even if the sensitivity is quite high, but frankly that’s expected from these kind of joysticks. You can still kind of press it softly on one side to do small movements.

The shoulder buttons are clicky and the d-pad and the ABXY buttons are not. The start and select buttons are both placed on the left-hand side of the console, but if you don’t like that you can easily remap the select/start buttons to the L3/R3 buttons. I personally don’t mind it heh.

It DOES have a mini-hdmi port (to connect to a TV), an SD card slot, a microUSB port (obviously), and a headphone jack.

YES, it supports USB-on-the-go, so you can plug in a keyboard, or a mouse, or even a usb joystick I think.

It has Android 4.4.4 but it’s not like you’ll need anything higher than that If your goal is to play emulators (And some games like F1 2016 can be modded to work on that version of android as well).

HOLD DOWN the app drawer button (the one right between the power button and the gamepad-mapper button) to access the SETTINGS menu of applications! (Works like a settings button!). If you just press it, it will open the recent apps menu instead.

Gamepad-mapper configurations are saved separately for each game/program so you don’t have to re-config every time you play!

In any case, I love this thing and It’s been worth all my money so far!

I’m thinking of making a new boot animation because the LegacyRom one looks a bit out of place tbh and because WHOO CUSTOMIZATION hhaha

Thanks for reading!