github Amiga500/Onion RedOnion-v4.5.0-20261106-3d9f2add
RedOnion V4.5.0-20261106
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31 minutes ago

🧅🔴 RedOnion 4.5.0 stable: Open MainUI 1.1.0, carousel and list views, video previews, Game Info menu, Saved Games

⚠️ Always back up your SD card before updating! At least copy Roms, Saves, BIOS and Screenshots to your PC.

✅ Stable. This is the stable release, offered to devices on both the stable and the beta OTA channel. It follows 4.4.0 directly: there was no public 4.5.0 beta, the build was tested by the RedOnion testers with the Open MainUI 1.1.0 release candidates.

This release brings Open MainUI 1.1.0 by @robcodedev: the console page as a grid, carousel or list, video previews in the game lists, a Game Info menu with a gallery, maps, walkthroughs and PDF manuals, and Saved Games to start a game from any of its save states. RedOnion adds reorganised Tweaks, new console pictures, a system core and Hide game in the game options, and safer SD card handling on install and update.

RedOnion is still a personal-use build. It is not a replacement for Onion and not an official release. It is based on Onion 4.4.0-beta, with Miyoo Mini Flip support ported from 4.5-dev, and runs on the Miyoo Mini, Mini+, Mini v4 and Mini Flip. Open MainUI is now 1.1.0, built from its source: https://github.com/robcodedev/onionos-mainui-opensource

🆕 New in 4.5.0

🖥️ Open MainUI 1.1.0 by @robcodedev

  • Console page as a grid, carousel or list, for Games and Expert, with its options in Tweaks › Home screen › Console page (size, spacing, animation, speed, wrap around…). The default is Rob's carousel.
  • Remember console: optionally reopens on the last console used, even after a shutdown (thanks zazzagone).
  • Video previews in the game lists, where the cover is or over the whole screen, after the wait you choose (thanks u/Kylie_Ray for the idea).
  • Game Info menu (SELECT in Game Info): a gallery with box art, screenshots and video, game maps with zoom, walkthroughs (TXT) and PDF manuals, with a loading panel while a big PDF opens. Files go in Roms/<console>/media/ (see Game media below).
  • Saved Games: a game's save states with their pictures, SNES included, with 4:3 previews for most home consoles and computers. Starting an older save replaces the auto save by default (Overwrite); Backup keeps it as "Previous Session", Swap trades the two. The layout is Framed by default, or Overlay. Arcade games have no Saved Games by default, as their core cannot load a state while a game starts (saved_games.disabled_rom_dirs in .tmp_update/config/game-menu.json).
  • Long titles scroll, rolling or bouncing, and the Game Info description can scroll by itself.
  • Full list: https://github.com/robcodedev/onionos-mainui-opensource/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

🧭 Tweaks

  • Menus reorganised, with clearer names. On/Off options are switches grouped together, and options are greyed out while what they need is off.
  • "(default)" marks the starting value, and long values scroll on the selected row.
  • Game lists › List menus is split into Games, Favorites, Recents, Search and GLO, and each entry of the game options (GLO) can be hidden (thanks Veuks for the review).
  • An option for every Open MainUI 1.1.0 setting: console page, game lists, previews, Game Info menu, Saved Games.

🎮 Games and game options (GLO)

  • System core: after choosing a core in "Game core", pick "This game only" or "All games of this system". The system core is kept after updates, and a per-game core still comes first (thanks u/Joecascio2000).
  • Hide game hides finished games from the list, Search and Recents; "Hidden games" brings them back. Saves and box art stay untouched.
  • Sega Saturn (experimental) in the Package Manager: Yabadabadoo 0.4, with a Saturn BIOS. Performance varies a lot between games.

🖼️ Console pictures

  • New pictures for the carousel and the list: KyleBing's Retro game console icons (CC BY 4.0), also for Search and Saturn. Console folders renamed or copied by hand keep their picture.

🕹️ GameSwitcher

  • Load shows "X DELETE", and save previews have the game's real shape.
  • X button artwork for the featured themes; in Silky RedOnion the bar has B and A on the sides, Y and X in the middle.

💾 SD card

  • Clean reboot after an install or an update: the installer, which also runs after every OTA update, now restarts through RedOnion's clean shutdown, as when you power off. It used a plain reboot (inherited from Onion), which could leave the card marked as not properly unmounted.
  • SD card check notice: if the card was not shut down cleanly (power lost, card removed, a crash), a notice at boot asks you to check it on a PC. It shows once.

📶 OTA update

  • More reliable connection check with curl, asking GitHub for the headers only (#311, thanks u/Nyiz).
  • MENU asks before stopping a download, and buttons pressed meanwhile no longer answer the next prompt (thanks u/kicksoda).
  • The app is called "Update RedOnion over internet".

🔧 Fixes

  • Settings: brightness, volume and mute set with the buttons are no longer reset when leaving Tweaks or applying a theme (#305, thanks @Roland013).
  • Battery: on the Mini+ and Flip, the GameSwitcher and the other RedOnion screens show the battery level while charging, like MainUI. The low battery warning falls back to 10%, as Tweaks shows.
  • Favorites: favfix no longer removes apps from Favorites (our fork of SearchFilter, thanks Veuks).
  • Search: each ROM folder is searched once (no more duplicates from Expert), and Expert systems are listed at the end (thanks zazzagone).
  • GLO: Favorites and Recents maintenance no longer starts the game (thanks fantomas).
  • Saved Games: starting a save no longer flashes the old GameSwitcher screenshot on the LOADING screen (thanks @robcodedev).
  • PDF manuals from Game Info: MENU closes the PDF and goes back to Game Info, and the reader's own buttons work (SELECT rotates the page).
  • Multi-disc playlists (m3u): no box art taken for the discs, titles with [ ] work, no space at the end of the name (#310, thanks u/tamamatuaai).
  • DraStic on the Mini v4 and Flip: no garbled screen on the first game opened.
  • Ports and ScummVM: "Import games" and "Change names" go back to the list.

📁 Game media (Open MainUI 1.1.0)

  • Everything goes in Roms/<console>/media/, one lower-case folder per kind, each file named like the ROM without its extension: box2dfront, box2dback, box3d, screenshot (Name.png, Name-1.png…), videos, maps (Name.png, Name-1.png…) and manuals (Name.txt walkthrough, Name.pdf manual).
  • Pictures and maps are PNG; maps up to 2000×2000 px (bigger ones are skipped). Videos up to 1280×720, H.264 MP4 recommended (the game-list preview uses the .mp4). Walkthroughs up to 2 MB.
  • The cover in the game list is still Imgs/<ROM name>.png, or the <image> of miyoogamelist.xml when the folder has one.

⚠️ Known issues

  • Long transfers: with nobody touching the console, a long FTP, HTTP or Samba transfer can be cut by the sleep timer (Settings › Sleep timer). Press a button now and then, or keep the device charging.
  • Tweaks is in English in every language.
  • OTA security (inherited from Onion): the updater downloads without checking TLS certificates and only verifies the size of the package. Verifying certificates and the package's SHA-256 is planned.

Please report RedOnion issues on the RedOnion tracker, with your model, the version (from .tmp_update/onionVersion/version.txt) and the steps to reproduce. Turning on Tweaks › Advanced › Diagnostics › Enable logging and sending .tmp_update/logs helps a lot.

🙏 Thanks

Thanks first to the Onion team and to the community. RedOnion sits on their work: the OS and the years of fixes already in the tree. None of this exists without that.

Thanks to @robcodedev for Open MainUI 1.1.0 and the close work on its integration, to zazzagone and Veuks for testing every release candidate and reviewing Tweaks, to @dredvm for the RedOnion name, logo and the Silky RedOnion theme, to KyleBing for the console icons, to @KNRBZ for the ideas behind Open MainUI's gallery, maps, walkthroughs and manuals, and to @Roland013, u/Joecascio2000, u/Nyiz, u/kicksoda, u/tamamatuaai, fantomas and u/Kylie_Ray for their reports, ideas and pull requests.

🔗 Links

New Contributors

Full Changelog: RedOnion-v4.4.0-beta-20261024-50860077...RedOnion-v4.5.0-20261106-3d9f2add

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