How to Make the GKD Pixel II Software Suck Less

Last updated: 01FEB2025 (see Changelog for details)

Here’s a quick rundown of what I did with the stock OS that came with my GKD Pixel to improve its overall look and feel. This is all totally subjective, and is likely to change as new versions of the Pixel’s IUX firmware are developed.

Switch to EmulationStation, set it to the default launcher

When you first boot the console, it will launch their IUX menu system, which looks to be a reskinned version of GMenu2x, which was a common UI back in the 2019-2020 era of retro handhelds. This is a totally serviceable menu system. To navigate around, just pick whatever category of gaming you want to play (arcade, handheld, etc), then navigate to the system and press A to see a list of games that are loaded on your card. From there you can launch each game.

Personally, I prefer the more robust options afforded within EmulationStation, especially since this stock OS is forked from ROCKNIX with a bunch of additional configuration options available.

To switch to EmulationStation as your default launcher, go into the Settings section within IUX and choose the Settings app. Under “Launcher”, change it from IUX to EmulationStation. Press B to exit the Settings app, it will ask you to save the settings. Press B again to get to the main menu, then press START then R1 to reboot the device into EmulationStation.

If you ever want to get back to IUX from EmulationStation, press START and select Quit > Enter IUX. You’ll need to go back into the Settings app and change the Launcher back to IUX if you want to boot into IUX in the future, otherwise it’ll take you back to EmulationStation upon the next reboot.

Hide unwanted systems

If you are seeing systems you don’t want to see, press START to bring up the Main Menu, then navigate to Game Collection Settings > Systems Displayed and disable any you want hidden.

Add your own games

My review unit card came with a bunch of pre-loaded cards, but depending on where you buy it from, you may get a card that isn’t preloaded with anything other than the OS. If you’d like to add your own games, remove the card from your device and then insert it into your PC (you may need a USB microSD card adapter). There will be two partitions on your card, one called EMUELEC and the other called ROMS. Open the ROMS partition and navigate to the “roms” folder within. This will contain over 100 different folders of supported systems, and you can add your games directly there. For a more detailed list of the systems and what file types and BIOS are required, check out the “Systems” section of the ROCKNIX wiki.

Get a USB WiFi dongle and adapter

To really take advantage of your device, a WiFi dongle is super handy. For the purposes of this video, I used this adapter, mostly because it’s known to be compatible with a lot of lower-end devices like those that use the RK3326 chipset. Other adapters might work as well! You will also need a USB-C adapter to interface with the GKD Pixel’s USB-C port.

In EmulationStation, press START to bring up the Main Menu, then go to Network Settings > Enable Network > ON. Once you have turned it on, press B to back out the Main Menu. You should see the light on your adapter (if it has one) light up; if it doesn’t, sometimes you need to unplug the adapter and plug it back in. Go back to Network Settings > WiFi SSD and you should see a list of your nearby networks. Choose the network of your choice, then enter the password under WiFi Key below that. Back out of the Network Settings menu, give it a minute, and it should connect. You will know your device is connected when you get a WiFi network symbol on the top-right of your screen and/or if you see an IP Address listed in your Network Settings menu.

Add new themes via network

The first thing I did with my device was to change out the theme to something a bit more personalized. I tried a bunch from the Batocera repo and Jetup’s gallery, but many of them don’t work properly with the EmulationStation configuration that GKD has released. The one I ended up liking the most is the Switch Theme which is a few years old but still really nice and clean.

To install this theme (or any other), go to its GitHub page, then click on the green “Code” button near the top-right. Select “Download zip”, and then once downloaded, extract that folder (it should be named “es-theme-switch-master”).

Now we need to connect to our device over WiFi, I recommend using a Samba share since it’s really simple. On your device, go to Network Settings and ensure that “Enable Samba” is turned on.

• PC connection: open a Windows Explorer window, and in the navigation bar type in “\\RK3326” or “\\192.168.86.XXX”, with XXX being the IP address specific to your device (which you can find in your device’s Network Settings once connected to WiFi). When trying to open one of the folders that appear, you will be prompted for a username and password, use “root” as the username and “rocknix” as the password.
• Mac connection: open Finder and in the top Menu Bar select Go > Connect to Server… and in the address bar that appears, type “smb://RK3326” or “smb://192.168.86.XXX” with XXX being your device’s IP address. When trying to open one of the folders that appear, you will be prompted for a username and password, use “root” as the username and “rocknix” as the password.

Once connected, navigate to emulationstation > themes and drop your folder into there. After the transfer is complete, you should find that theme under UI Settings in your EmulationStation menu.

Manually scrape boxart

The boxart with your stock card (if there is any) will be relatively haphazard. Since I removed all of the stock games and replaced them with my own, I scraped my own boxart as well. The Stock OS doesn’t have a functioning scraper option, so you will need to do it offline with an app called Skraper. I actually made a video about this process nearly four years ago and it still works fine, you can find it above!

PortMaster

PortMaster will be preloaded on your Stock OS and surprisingly, it actually works! This is most likely because GKD is using the Anbernic RG351MP version of ROCKNIX as their OS base, and that also has working PortMaster functionality. Make sure that you are connected to your network, then go into Tools > PortMaster. You will be prompted to update your PortMaster on first boot.

Note that if your device comes pre-loaded with some ports (mine came with a few), updating PortMaster will likely break them. To fix this, go into PortMaster’s “Manage Ports” section and reinstall the ports. If that still doesn’t work, delete the ports and reinstall them with your own commercial files.

Music player

Once connected with PortMaster, you can find the GMU Music app in the “Ready to Run” ports section of the app. Download that and then put your music files in the roms > ports > gmu-music-player > music folder on your card (each album can be put in its own subfolder). Now, on your device navigate to Ports > GMU Music Player to launch the app. You’ll be greeted by a quick start guide which will walk you through the controls for the app.

The only real bummer I’ve found from this GMU Music App (including the version that comes with the OS) is that the usual way of turning off your screen (SELECT/MENU + Up on the d-pad) doesn’t seem to work.

Game streaming

Yes, it is possible to use Moonlight to steam from a PC to your GKD Pixel 2. To do so, I recommend using the Moonlight New app available on PortMaster, and following the Apollo guide instructions in the video above. I wasn’t able to get controls working on my device while testing, so further investigation is needed.

Add native Pico-8

There will be a Pico-8 section installed on your Stock OS, but it hasn’t been properly configured. To do so, follow the ROCKNIX wiki page on the subject, and add the commercial files to the roms/pico-8 folder on your device. Once you have your files added, be sure to go to Main Menu > Game Settings > Per System Advanced Configuration and set the Pico-8 emulator to Pico-8: Pico8 (and not Fake08).

You should now be able to go into the Pico-8 section on your device and launch Splore (with an internet connection to download games). You can also add your carts (png files) manually to the Pico-8 folder (download them directly from Lexaloffle here).

Make a version of StarkOS?

Something to consider is that because we are using the Switch theme on the GKD Pixel, we could further simplify the OS experience by creating a tailored version of boxart to match that theme. I did something similar with “StarkOS” last year, creating an OS that was tailored for non-reading kids and those who aren’t tech savvy. Check out the guide here to see what might be possible. The only distinction is that Stock OS (and ROCKNIX) doesn’t have a quick shutdown and resume function like ArkOS, so it won’t be a perfect match. But still fun to think of the possibilities!

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Changelog

01FEB2025
– published guide