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 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…

I’ve been playing Galgame again lately, but I got fed up with my old device and went back to the Windows tablet camp. This time it’s a Lenovo 10-inch tablet with an N200 — performance and keyboard are nothing to write home about, but the screen is decent and the battery holds up. Personally I’d say it’s a bit better than the Surface Go 4. I’ll save the tablet talk for another time; today it’s about the software side. Going back to a Windows tablet for Galgame, my old workflow felt a bit off. So I sorted out what I actually need when playing Galgame: Fast Ctrl-to-skip, and easy access to the game’s backlog Toggle between fullscreen and windowed Easy one-tap screenshots Show current power draw so I know how much battery time is left With the requirements clear, I outsourced it — to AI, for free — and called the result Gal Touch.

Back in the handheld emulator scene, a lot of people were obsessed with the idea of a “fighting handheld.” Mostly old-timers grinding KOF 97, pining for a handheld with good feel that could handle fighting games, or side-scrolling beat ’em ups and the like. And of course the god of the bootleg handheld world, Zhou Ge, answered their prayers with the Anbernic RG-Arc, a machine that’s blatantly modeled on the Saturn, complete with the standard six-button layout and that familiar disc-style D-pad. But once the thing came out, a bunch of old-timers weren’t happy, saying the design fell way short of the original Saturn, especially the D-pad feel, which was off by more than a little. They all insisted that only the original Saturn pad had that flavor, that perfect balance of firmness and give, that silky-smooth quarter-circle execution…

Preface: I’ve never really had any particular need for a tablet, but it’s not like I have zero use for one either. I do want a tablet. My needs are simple: use it as a reader, browse the web, watch videos, read PDFs, listen to something to fall asleep to at night. That’s it. The tablet I’d been using was a cheap used LG I picked up from OK’s place. I don’t think I ever wrote about it, but for 300 yuan it’s worth the price — it does fine as a video machine. Its biggest problem is the system. It’s an Android tablet, and a Japanese Android tablet at that, packed with all sorts of junk that causes all sorts of problems, whether it’s system updates or app compatibility. For example, I ran into a situation where my proxy app wouldn’t work. If my home network didn’t have a global proxy, this thing really wouldn’t be able to watch YouTube. So I had an idea: why not try using Linux as a tablet? GNOME, for instance, has been criticized for years for having a UI that’s too “touch-oriented” — so if you actually use it as a touch tablet, wouldn’t it be more suitable? Once the idea was there, I got to work.

Preface: Retro handhelds (open-source handhelds) have been kind of popular these past few years. I’ve bought and sold a few myself. Honestly, before this I was just following the crowd — I barely played any games on them, it was more about messing with the hardware. Lately I’ve been thinking about settling down and actually playing something seriously, so I started wondering whether I should put together a “handheld” that genuinely fits my needs. So after a whole bunch of tinkering, I ended up with a result I’m reasonably happy with. I figured I’d write it up and share it with anyone who’s had the same idea, in the hope it helps or gives some inspiration.

Getting older, I still like looking at the pretty and the hot stuff for the eye candy, but I also like messing around with e-waste. The regular stuff just doesn’t excite me anymore. And the hottest e-waste lately is all the Linux-based “xinchuang” (信创) gear. “Xinchuang” is basically the mainland’s push for domestic everything—replacing the “Western” and “open source” stuff with fully Chinese products so nobody can strangle you with supply chain sanctions. Whether that’s realistic, whether it’s feasible, how far along it actually is—let’s set all that aside. At the very least, the xinchuang scene does enough work with and on top of Linux to satisfy a Linux guy’s urge to tinker with junk. I’d wanted a Loongson laptop for a while, but that batch of RMS-endorsed 198-yuan group-buy machines is now stupidly expensive, and the specs and pricing are just absurd. Newer Loongson laptops are also pricey, out of my league, so I just watched from the sidelines. Then a kind soul reached out a hand. With help from a certain big shot, I somehow got my hands on a “xinchuang laptop.” Carrying that person’s earnest warnings, I started my own xinchuang journey.

I keep seeing posts like this online: “Looking for a device to play Gal.” “Which tablet is good for eroge?” “This handheld is great, a perfect eroge-dedicated machine.” … Sometimes I’m confused too. The “Galgame” category has been a dying industry for ages, so why does it look like there are still so many fans online, willing to spend real money on a pricey dedicated device just for it? Actually, long-time readers of my blog probably know that about 10+ years ago I wrote a similar article. I briefly laid out some of my own views back then; some hold up now, some were incomplete. After all these years I’ve built up a fair amount of galgame experience and cycled through a lot of devices for playing them. Maybe we should sit down and talk about this again, and share some of my experience.

About two years ago I bought a China-market Fossil Gen 5 smartwatch. I already covered why I bought it and how it felt to use in an earlier post, so I won’t repeat that here. Today I’m just going to talk about my after-sales experience with this watch. First off, less than a year in, I accidentally scraped the bezel on one side, exposing the bare metal underneath the black finish. That bugged me for a while. I even tried some nail polish type stuff to cover it up, but it was no use—just a little mental scab I couldn’t pick off. Also, after a year or so of use, the battery life was nowhere near what it used to be. I remember in the beginning I could leave Always Display on and still get a day and a half. Later, even with Always Display off, it barely lasted a day. Pretty clear the battery health had declined. Then the watch started acting weird. The speaker would intermittently produce distorted sound. Whenever you got a message, the watch would make a sound, but it was this harsh, crackly noise—super annoying. The thing is, it wasn’t easy to reproduce. Sometimes it happened, sometimes not. I couldn’t figure out if it was a software issue or a hardware issue.

So I upgraded to a 2K HDR screen a while back, used it for a bit, and honestly the colors are a little too vivid, and even with 500 nits I never use the brightness. But the biggest thing: 2560 x 1440 is just stuck in an awkward middle ground. I’m a Linux user, and Linux has always been terrible at fractional scaling. People say Wayland supports it now, but one, my discrete GPU has no Wayland driver, and two, Wayland performance is a joke — the mouse stuttering in particular is absolutely maddening. Word is Wayland mouse handling goes through libinput, which shares a single thread with gnome-shell, so high system load equals stutter. Fucking stupid. In the end I couldn’t stand 2K’s nonsense scaling anymore and chose to “throw money at the problem” — went 4K.