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
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
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 ๐)
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
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 ๐
Here's the good rip I got after MANY tries https://archive.org/details/M8-8001100-V8.0-20240828-64G
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New blog post! The Sega Master System... Girl? Another variant of Sega's 8-bit console that I haven't looked at before; I hope you enjoy! https://nicole.express/2025/sega-mistress-system.html