The idea of a “premium” feel often gets thrown around when discussing budget handhelds that are trying to punch well above their weight. Premium experience isn’t just about video previews or a boot animation. It’s about stability, playability, and sensible (realistic?) expectations for what the hardware on these devices are actually capable of.
Take PPSSPP and/or YabaSanshiro, for example. They’re the more demanding emulators out there (excluding N64 here…), and no matter what custom firmware you’re using, it needs a fair bit of configuration to run well. StockOS likes to apply certain tweaks as standard, like forced frame skipping or limiting to 30fps.
Side note you can install the PPSSPP cheat archive via the muOS Archive Manager.
These little “fixes” give the illusion of smoother performance, but it’s mostly smoke and mirrors, it’s degradation of features for sake of performance. muOS doesn’t include those by default, not because we’re against them, but because we’re aiming for transparency and flexibility. You can absolutely install and enable them yourself if you feel like they’ll help your experience.
Speaking of performance however, muOS isn’t doing anything inherently “degrading” as some might find. In fact, we ship with the latest emulator builds, and RetroArch cores (where possible), which means you’re getting newer features, bug fixes, and better long-term support. StockOS might feel faster at first glance, but often that comes from older versions tailored to specific games which can become a liability down the track. Falling behind on upstream updates just to preserve one or two edge case performance boosts isn’t sustainable or worthwhile. If we did ship with older builds, we’d get the usual flood of “wHy ArE yOu NoT uSiNg ThE lAtEsT vErSiOn Of XyZ?”.
If you genuinely think things could run better, or you have a configuration that improves performance we welcome it. muOS is an open project, and the dev crew have spent countless hours testing, tuning, and pushing these devices as far as they’ll go. At the end of the day, you’re still working with limiting hardware. There is only so much you can do before it stops being a question of firmware and starts being one of expectation.