Hi, I recently bought a gameshell second hand from a youtuber who was done with it. The battery life on it isn’t very good at all, he said it was due to it being the “kickstarter” version. Anyone have any good ideas of what kind of replacement battery i could get or where to get one from? I would really enjoy using it more often but because it seems to die within an hour i cant help but not play it to often. I also don’t want to keep it on a charger 24/7 either because I can’t help but feel that wouldn’t be good for it. Any suggestions for my problem would be greatly appreciated!
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Very large discussion in this thread about swapping out the battery with a better / larger one. Swapping out Battery for Larger Capacity Li-Ion?
I have done it myself and my Gameshell gets about 4-6 hours of battery life with constant use.
ive seen this one however i feel i might get lost in the conversations happening, does the original adafruit from that post work well?
The adafruit li-ion batteries work fine, just make sure you get a 3.7v battery with appropriate dimensions to fit either loose inside the case or within the batter module.
As in the thread mentioned, I bought and am using this battery, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01NAX9XYG. It is 3.7v 2500mAh and fits loose in the GameShell. I used some card stock to make a spacer so it doesn’t slide around in the shell.
I also bought these connectors mentioned in the thread, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0738CV1LP, which are required as most of the batteries come with a connector that is too large.
The biggest part of this is making sure the new connector is oriented properly, sometimes it is reverse of what it should be (not always black to black and red to red). Easiest way is to check with a multimeter. Otherwise you can damage the gameshell.
I would highly recommend reading through that thread fully, and see what others have done, and what precautions you need to take, then decide.
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ill have to look into this. i REALLY want to get this thing running longer!
I also added a new, larger battery to mine and it works great. Even when new, the original battery didn’t offer much life for the device. I’d also recommend upgrading your OS to 0.5 (get another SD card and flash it, or flash the one you have now), as the updates have improved battery usage as well.
thank you for letting me know! the comments on the update have made me leery of processing the flash though
I did the full reflash to the official 0.5 and so far it’s been working well. The update patch from 0.4 to 0.5 seemed to be causing problems for people who used it, so I figured I wouldn’t take that risk. It also seems like the patch may have only been tested against a clean 0.4 image install, so changes could have caused unexpected problems. While I appreciate the effort that has gone into the DEOT variants, I also avoided those since people have had problems with them as well and it does seem like they have been tested well (and are constantly changing as a result).
I haven’t set up all the emulators yet, but 0.5 has been stable for me, and once I copied ROMs over again, the NES, SNES, PSX, and MAME emulators have worked fine. I may have tried one or two others too, just going from memory here. Pico-8 works great, and seems a bit faster than before. MAME does too. The custom built MAME from another thread on here that guu built (and which is a newer MAME build so compatible with more games) runs well too. I’ve been tinkering with the box86 stuff and have been amazed at the Linux (x86) game ports that are working under Gameshell using that emulation layer. (Just recently got Super Hexagon working, from an old Humble Bundle copy I had – I’ll post on that other thread soon.) The only thing I know doesn’t work is mupen for N64 emulation, but I haven’t tried to fix it yet because it wasn’t something I wanted to try right away. (I expect it might be too slow to be fully playable anyway!)
In short, 0.5 seems to be stable, faster (with working Lima support for accelerated video), and better for battery life. It also seems like it has less issues than the DEOT version, but I haven’t tried it to compare since the numerous posts about issues on it convinced me to try 0.5 official first.