About r36s.org

What this site is

A reference for people who already own an R36S or are deciding whether to buy one. It covers what the hardware can and cannot do, which firmware is still maintained, how to set the device up, what to do when it stops working, and how to tell a genuine unit from a clone.

There are around a hundred pages, in English and Spanish. Everything published in English is published in Spanish too, apart from pages that only make sense in one of them.

We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any manufacturer or seller of the R36S. Nobody pays for coverage here, and no manufacturer sees a page before it goes up.

How the information here is checked

The R36S is sold by many sellers under many names, its firmware situation changes, and a lot of the advice circulating about it is out of date rather than malicious. So the working method is less about writing and more about checking:

• Primary sources over repetition. Where a claim can be traced to the people who would know, it is. The firmware guide reports ArkOS as retired because ArkOS’s own wiki says so. The Dreamcast guide reports the BIOS as optional because libretro’s core definition lists it that way and Flycast ships its own fallback.
• Numbers are cross-checked between pages. A specification stated on one page has to match every other page that states it. Where two pages disagreed, one of them was wrong, and finding out which has corrected real errors — a battery capacity, a screw count, which side the SD slots are on.
• Claims that cannot be substantiated are reported as such. Where the community repeats a setting we cannot verify does anything, we say that rather than passing it on. The SH-4 clock advice in the Dreamcast guide is an example: widely recommended, disputed in the emulator’s own issue tracker, so we describe the disagreement instead of quoting a number.
• Absence is checked as well as presence. When a reader asks whether something exists, “we could not find it” is not the same as “it is not there”. The Simpsons: Hit & Run page exists because searching PortMaster’s published catalogue for all of its entries returned nothing, which is a different and more useful answer than a guess.

What this site will not do

• Point you at one seller. Store links open search results rather than a single listing. This device is heavily cloned and listings die constantly, so the useful thing is teaching the checks, not naming a shop that may be gone next month. The clone detection guide is the checks.
• Let a commission change a recommendation. Some store links earn a small commission. They are marked wherever they appear, and they have never decided what a page says. Where the honest answer is “buy something else”, the pages say so — our buying guide tells anyone prioritising Dreamcast, N64 or PSP to spend more on different hardware.
• Leave something wrong because fixing it is inconvenient. When a correction lands, every page carrying the same claim is corrected with it, not just the one someone happened to read.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, telling us is the single most useful thing you can do, and it is welcome even when it is blunt. Firsthand corrections are especially valuable: this hardware varies between production batches, and someone who has the device in front of them frequently knows something a page does not.

Write to contact@r36s.org, or see the contact page for what is most useful to include.

How this is paid for

Some links to stores are affiliate links, meaning a purchase made through them may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. The site may also show ads. Both are disclosed where they appear, and the privacy policy sets out what data those services collect.