hashtagbasit/SteamOS-ARM-Handhelds v1.3-beta10

v1.3 beta 10: new bottom screen, real sleep and a lot of fixes

on GitHub

Beta 10 is the last 8 Gen 2 beta before v1.3 stable, so it's packed. Thanks to everyone who sent logs and photos, almost every fix below came from one of your reports!

What's new

• SD cards run at full speed. The new kernel had them stuck in the slowest mode, which made loading, downloads and the whole system a lot slower than it should be.
• AYANEO Pocket S 2K: black screen fixed, should work as expected.
• Buttons: A/B are right on the Odin 2 Mini and Portal again (beta 9 flipped them), and the AYANEO Pockets should show up as one controller instead of two, so A/B don't swap around anymore.
• Retroid Pocket 6: Volume Up should work again, and the touchscreen should respond at the full 120 Hz instead of around 28 Hz.
• New bottom screen for the AYN Thor and AYANEO Pocket DS: a stats page (frame rate graph, temperatures, clocks, power, battery time left), controls (performance profile, fan, brightness, volume, stick lights on the Thor), and a trackpad and keyboard for the top screen. Apps you open on the bottom screen get their own keyboard. It's also sized properly now and doesn't flicker anymore.
• AYN Thor: Steam's brightness slider should now control both screens, instead of dimming only the bottom one. The bottom screen's brightness can be set on its own from the new Controls page.
• Real sleep (experimental): make an empty file called s2idle on the BOOT drive to use real sleep instead of standby. It should use a lot less battery overnight. If you try it, send me the output of journalctl -b | grep "s2idle report", and delete the file if your device doesn't wake up properly.
• Standby uses less battery: the controller input service now pauses in standby too.
• Games that minimize themselves behind Quick Access (GTA IV and other fullscreen games) come back when you close it, instead of a black screen or a tiny frozen picture.
• Charging: if the charger was plugged in while booting, it could get stuck on slow charging until you replugged it. It now fixes itself a few seconds after boot.
• Wi-Fi reconnects faster after booting or waking up, it was taking 4 to 8 seconds before, should be much faster now.
• Settings stick: anything you turn on in Desktop Mode (like SSH) actually starts after a reboot now.
• Decky: updated to 3.2.10, so plugins that broke on 3.2.9 load again, and Decky waits for the network before starting plugins.
• Games run without the Steam Frame's remaining VR layers (headset-only rendering tweaks that Steam added to every game).
• Smoother 1% lows on the 8 Gen 2, and the fan doesn't spin up to full when you shut down.
• Debug logs now record CPU/GPU speeds while you play, so performance reports are much easier to look into.

Known issues

• Some games might still run slower, make sure to share the debug log which now include the new performance metrics.

Download

Download the three .7z parts below and extract the .001 one with 7-Zip or WinRAR, that gives you the .img. SHA256s are in SHA256SUMS.

Installing

1. Flash ROCKNIX ABL 1.1.8 or newer for SM8550 to abl_a and abl_b.
2. Flash the .img to a microSD card (32GB+) with balenaEtcher or Rufus.
3. Hold Volume Down while turning it on, pick your device in Set device model, set boot mode to Linux and hit START.

First boot takes a couple of minutes.

Still not booting or something broken? Make a text file called debug on the SD card's BOOT drive, boot and wait 3 minutes (or play a bit if it's a performance problem), then send the debug-logs folder on discord.

Supporting the project

any amount raised will be used to buy devices to support and boost development, a star helps too!

_{Unofficial community port, not affiliated with or endorsed by Valve.}