Results from the device compatibility survey

Hi!

We wish to thank everyone that participated in the device compatibility survey, we received 222 responses which we think was a very good outcome! A number of new devices were added to the compatibility list, which you can find here:
https://gitlab.com/es-de/emulationstation-de/-/blob/master/ANDROID.md?ref_type=heads#device-compatibility

We received a handful of reports of Android 9 devices and 32-bit devices not working as well, but we have not included those in the list as they don't fulfill the basic requirements for ES-DE which is 64-bit Android 10 or later. There were however some non-supported devices that we are not certain whether they are using a 32-bit OS or not so we did include those (for the time being at least).

We also received a number of comments, and although the overwhelming majority were positive and confirmed that ES-DE is working fine, there were some requests and issues reported. We'll try to answer the most common ones here:

• Issue: When launching a game there's only a black screen - This is not a device compatibility problem but an emulator problem. The most common reason is that the RetroArch version from the Google Play store has been installed. This release is very old and doesn't work correctly on a number of devices. Installing the latest 64-bit version from the RetroArch website should resolve the problem (and you need to install the cores you want to use from inside RetroArch of course)

• Request: Defining multiple ROM directories - Splitting up the game system directories across multiple storage devices is supported but it's not recommended as it breaks portability and the ability to easily migrate your ES-DE setup across different devices and operating systems. It's also tedious to setup. It's doable though and is described in the ES-DE Android documentation

• Request: Add support for Yaba Sanshiro 2 - This has already been added and is coming in the next release. But the emulator developer only added basic support with a recent update, so although .chd files now work fine when launching games from ES-DE there is still no support for .bin/.cue files. We have asked the developer to add support for these file types as well but as far as we know it's not been implemented yet

• Issue: Redream not working on the Odin 2 when launched from ES-DE - This is due to a bug in the Odin 2 firmware/OS image and has been reported to Ayn a number of weeks ago. We have recently received confirmation from Ayn that the bug report has been forwarded to their developers, but we don't know if or when it will be resolved

• Request: Add support for Tate/vertical mode - This is already supported, to enable it use the setting "Rotate Screen" in the "Other Settings" menu. Be aware though that not many themes will look good with screen rotation enabled. This will hopefully improve in the future as more themes get updated with support for vertical layouts

• Request: Add ability to use the Android soft keyboard to for example paste text into ES-DE using the touch interface - This is possible already if disabling the "Enable virtual keyboard" setting in the "UI Settings" menu. There is a however a bug in the SDL library that introduces rendering issues if combining this with controller input. But you can use it without any issues if you only use touch input with ES-DE. The problem has been reported to the SDL developers some weeks ago but it's not been resolved yet

• Issue - Can't run games in RetroArch on recent Android releases when mounting the ROMs directory under /mnt/media_rw/ - This is a RetroArch limitation, it has not been updated for current Android releases and is using an old storage access method. An update to RetroArch is therefore needed before this can be accomplished (i.e. it's not an ES-DE issue)

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