Today’s Xinchuang story is a side chapter, about a laptop with another “domestic CPU.” By pure chance I got my hands on a machine running a Zhaoxin KX-6640MA, labeled as a Feedme F9 Pro. I bought it dirt cheap, and it even came standard with 16GB of RAM. Zhaoxin’s bad reputation precedes it, but you can’t tell a horse from a donkey without racing it — I had to feel this thing out myself.

I’ve talked before about Lenovo’s “Kaitian D10” tablet, which works as a dedicated Galgame machine. It’s great value for the price and totally fine at that price point, but there were still a few things about it that bugged me. Performance is too weak, it can only run Win10 Screen colors are good, but still not good enough The Secure Boot certificate expired, so it throws an error at boot None of these are huge problems, but they’re still a bit annoying. Then, by pure coincidence, I saw someone on eBay selling the upgraded version of this thing: the “Kaitian D11”, codename IdeaPad Duet 3 11IAN8.

There was a time when Asa Project’s nickname in the Chinese community was “the face-meme studio,” thanks to those deranged expressions their characters pull. And the shameless gag romance plots, peaking with Renai 0 Kilometer. But Asa Project themselves don’t seem happy with that reputation. After that came Kansetsu Renai and then everything afterward slowly dialed the “face memes” down — at first every heroine had them, then just one, and by now… you basically can’t find any. Personally I think Asa Project sees itself as a pure-love studio that expresses its stories through various definitions of “love.” Every game they pick a new flavor of “love” and put it right there in the title — indirect love, two-timing love, triangle love, love rivalry, part-time-job love, side-character love… at this point I’m convinced they write “renai” in the title first and fill in the rest later. After over a year, Asa Project is back with a new one: Ousama Renai (王様恋愛). The official blurb says the protagonist is a rich young heir who lives like a king every day, and the hook is “love initiated by the man.” At a glance it screams “domineering CEO sweeps me off my feet.” Then I finished the game and… no, that’s not what this is at all.

The Arduboy is an open-source, credit-card-sized handheld built on the Arduino platform. It’s all about that 8-bit era feel—roughly, you know, a step above those black-and-white LCD Tetris handhelds. The project actually started as a way to promote Arduino, something Arduino fans cooked up themselves. It later hit Kickstarter, became a proper product, and turned into a geek toy. As more people bought it, they did a bunch of collabs and even put out an enhanced Arduboy FX with more preloaded games and USB-C link play… It looks commercial, but the thing is fundamentally open source. You can buy an ATmega32u4 chip and, by mooching off companies like JLC, solder one together yourself. No need to buy the official version—especially since the official one has been out of stock and getting pricier lately.

Happy Mid-Autumn, everyone 🎑! This time I got my hands on a rather unusual handheld. The community calls it the “underwear machine,” because the thing is shaped like a pair of briefs. What makes it special is that it takes actual GBA game cartridges, and the design is clearly a bit of a nod to the GBA. It’s quite cheap — under 280 yuan. I don’t know what the processor is; probably a Rockchip. The OS is a heavily customized Linux. The biggest visual highlight is the front panel: a single piece of glass, and it looks genuinely nice. Sadly, that’s where the good parts end.

The Trimui Smart is a pretty unusual early handheld. Unlike the big “shanzhai” makers who lean on the open-source community to supply a “usable system,” Trimui has always built its own custom system, and it actually works well. Most people know the later Trimui Smart Pro, the handheld that claims it can play PSP — though not comfortably — and whose real selling point is killer standby time (the perk of a custom system is deep optimization), plus the Trimui Brick that carried on the Smart Pro’s traits, and so on… I’ve actually used both the Trimui Smart Pro and the Trimui Brick, and sold them later. Not because the system was bad — mainly because the build quality was so poor. Burrs everywhere, and the buttons are stiff as hell… But today we’re not talking about those two. We’re talking about the Trimui Smart, the first product in the line.

I once had a chance to be among the first people using a Loongson laptop, but I let it slip. Later, when Loongson was clearing out that batch of laptops on its official site for a mere 300 yuan, I didn’t bite either — and then that batch went up in price because it was the same model Stallman used. Kind of absurd. But given how RAM prices have shot up, upgrading a computer with a new machine is basically hopeless now, so I figured I’d mess around with Xinchuang and get ready for the day domestic hardware takes over my workplace. Maybe all these weird things I’m tinkering with now will be what I have to use at work. If I have to try it eventually, might as well try it early. So a while back, with a friend’s help, I got my hands on a Loongson laptop — the kind with the most stock and the hottest demand on secondhand marketplaces right now. The machine is brand new: 3A6000 + 16G + 512G. The manufacturer is Chengmai, though the seller said, “They’re all made by Chengmai, I’ve got several brands stickered on the back here, which one do you want?” In the end I picked the one with a dragon on the back — at least it can be compared to Apple…

A batch of HP docks showed up on eBay recently for 69 yuan with free shipping. Full name: Elite X3 Lapdock. It was originally made to pair with HP’s own Windows Phone handsets, but thanks to the well-known reasons, the Windows Phone market is completely dead, and this thing is now an awkward orphan nobody wants. Like most people, I had fantasies about it too. Could this be a cheap TNT Go? So I grabbed one to find out.

Preface Maybe you get old and start getting nostalgic. Lately everything new feels boring to me, and I’ve been missing the past. So I got the urge to build an “old computer” — install Win98, WinXP, or even Windows 7 on something. The Win9X and XP eras seemed like a hassle, so I decided to start with Win7. The other reason I went with Win7 is that I spotted a batch of cheap new-old-stock laptops on eBay: the Dell Latitude 3340, the first generation, the Haswell one. Stock config is 4GB RAM and a 500GB HDD, and the key point is “brand new old stock” — compared with those ThinkPads that have been flipped who-knows-how-many times, that’s one advantage. After some research I found this thing drives Windows 7 perfectly. Even the weird Intel integrated HD4600 can utterly demolish retro games from the Windows 7 era, so it’s a solid choice for revisiting stuff from around 2010. With that beautiful fantasy in mind, I bought this new-old-stock machine.

I’ve been playing Galgames again lately, so I started looking for a new device. The reason I didn’t just keep using the Rog Ally X handheld is mainly that it’s inconvenient for slacking off — one look and it’s obviously a game console, way too conspicuous. So I started shopping around. My budget is really limited, so I unexpectedly found that a batch of these has recently shown up on the secondhand market: the Lenovo Kaitian D10. Plenty are advertised as being in great condition, but I figure they were probably recycled from somewhere too.