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
I've written up my findings about it here along with more photos of the stick and its PCB https://museum.12bit.club/Game_Stick_Lite_M8-8001100
Here's the note I wrote to myself reminding me to take pictures of the back of it to show the unique ventilation hole that other variants do not have
ANYWAY the upshot of all that is I think I can probably finally sell them now ha ha ha
So if you want to buy one? Let's say £8 GBP, including a freshly reflashed SD card? (Not including shipping and tariffs and whatever bullshit I have no control over) DM me yeah
You could use the bad emulation system as is, or run the CFW (it's not as well optimised as stock but it's way more configurable and flexible), or try to build some other OS for it..... it's basically a tiny cheap little computer at this point? Who needs a raspberry pi when you can have a game stick
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