Jeremy Clark CodeZombie

How to extract the .fex file from the SD card dump of a GA36-MB firmware.

Install bin2fex via sunxi-tools: https://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-tools
Find the offset of script.bin: grep -obUaP "product\x00" sdcard.img | awk -F: '$1>20000000 && $1<20400000'
That will give you some offsets. Try them in reverse order, subtracting 16.
dd if=sdcard.img of=script.bin bs=1 skip=<the offset you just found - 16> count=131072 status=progress
Attempt to convert it: bin2fex script.bin > hardware.fex
If it gives you an error, try the other offset(s) you found.

NOTE: script.bin will exist in the first 128mb of the sdcard, so you can cut that out first before step 2 if you want to save time.

GA36-MB V1.x MicroSD Card Mount/MBR Fix Guide

Preamble

The Master Boot Record on the stock microSD card that comes with the GA36-MB v1.x is broken.

Master Boot Record (MBR) is a table at the very beginning of the microSD card that tells your computer about all the partitions on the card.

MBR takes up exactly 512 bytes, and must end with the two bytes 0x55 and 0xaa

Through some series of mistakes, negligence, or general incomptence, the manufacturer of the ga36mbv1.2 has set these two bytes instead to 0xc3 and 0x5a. This means no operating system will enumerate the table, and no partitions will be mountable.

GA36-MB V1.2-20260416 [The latest(?) fake r36s]

So I got scammed.

I was trying to buy a proper r36s clone so I could play Stardew Valley in the bathtub. My mistake. Instead, I ended up with a "GA36-MB." Identical in every way from the outside, this little guy is quite the imposter. The CPU is allegedly not a Rockchip RK3326, but an Allwinner A33. From a performance perspective that's a little bit of a downgrade, but the real kicker is that the rockchip is a 64 bit chip and the allwinner is 32. More like allloser amirite. I'm not 100% convinced that this is the case though, I've seen a lot of conflicting information on this, so I intend to put the question to rest, though I'm hoping it's a rockchip.

(Spoiler alert: It's not a rockchip. It's a 32-bit allwinner with 512mb of ram.)

Hello!

I'm going to walk you through setting up the ESP-IDF inside of VSCode with Devcontainers.

This worked for me with the immutable fedora-based distro Aurora, though the steps should be similar for any distro.

For non-immutable (mutable?) linux distros you don't have to install the base ESP-IDF in a devcontainer, though I would still recommend it.

Installing the prerequisites

Install VSCode. In Aurora this is easy, just enable dev mode: ujust devmode.

Steps to fix the "spawn udevadm ENOENT" error inside the ESP-IDF dev container.

Launch the dev container in vscode and open a terminal.
Open a terminal. Confirm that you're in the remote devcontainer terminal, and not on your host system.
apt-get update
apt-get install udev
Now in your devcontainer.json file, add this to the end of the dict:

  "runArgs": [
    "--device=/dev/ttyACM0",
 "--privileged"

	[product]
	version = "100"
	machine = "evb"

	[platform]
	eraseflag = 0
	next_work = 2

	[target]
	boot_clock = 1008

	[product]
	version = "100"
	machine = "evb"

	[platform]
	eraseflag = 0
	next_work = 2

	[target]
	boot_clock = 1008

	#include "esp_lcd_panel_io.h"
	#include "esp_lcd_panel_vendor.h"
	#include "esp_lcd_panel_ops.h"
	#include "esp_lcd_ili9341.h"

	#define SPI_HOST SPI2_HOST // FSPI on S2

	esp_lcd_panel_handle_t panel_handle;

	void initialize_ili9341() {

	[plugin]

	name="PolyTools"
	description="Adds tools to the inspector to make editing a Polygon2d a little easier."
	author="CodeZombie"
	version="1.0"
	script="polytools_plugin.gd"

	import time

	class DELAY:
	def __init__(self):
	pass

	@classmethod
	def INPUT_TYPES(cls):
	return {
	"required": {