Recently for stupid reasons I got hold of a box of 10 of these game sticks so I thought I'd keep one and sell the rest. But in testing I found that it's a particularly weird clone with an SD card that can't be normally read in a PC, and the cards are extremely poor quality & most have bad sectors

I didn't want to sell them with defective cards, so I decided to rip one of the good ones & clone it to some new cheap-but-ok cards

In this process I found that only 2 of the 10 cards were good 🙃

Here's the good rip I got after MANY tries https://archive.org/details/M8-8001100-V8.0-20240828-64G

The other thing I wanted to do was figure out if there was a way to make the cards normally readable in a PC so you could add your own games. Turns out that's impossible because the stick's bootloader is where the partition table would normally be, so you can create one but then the stick won't boot

BUT they have an undocumented feature where if you connect the stick to a PC via a Micro USB data cable it mounts a 1GB partition which corresponds to a section in the stick's menu, so you can indeed add games. (The USB cable in the box is power-only so it does not work for this 🙃)

I guess I haven't mentioned what it actually IS since I'm so in the weeds on this shit lol. It's a stick that plugs into a TV & plays emulated games (NES/SNES/MD/GB/GBC/GBA/PS1/Arcade/Atari). The emulators run OK but nothing is configurable and it's forced 16:9. Versions of this thing get everywhere

There is a pretty big community of people hacking these sticks out there, this particular clone is less-known than others but amazingly there is a toolchain available for the SOC and someone has built custom firmware that just runs plain retroarch on it https://lucamot.github.io/GStickOS/index.html