[Android TV General] Oranguman:
I was able to load the rooted A7 firmware on the device, and it's definitely an improvement. Being able to move things around on the onboard memory is certainly helpful. I'm attempting a few things like installing adoptable storage, a unique launcher, and a suitable command line environment.

It's just for fun at this point. The box's specs look good on paper, but at the end of the day it runs at 70+ degrees centigrade (160F!!!) while just using youtube, and has bad CPU spikes always, so I doubt it will become a useful dev environment regardless of what I do. To stress test the box I installed a couple of emulators, here are the results:

Retroarch: available on app store. relatively easy setup, was able to navigate file system. Good results up to 4th generation consoles, workable results with 5th gen. Can use device as coffee mug warmer when it tries to render polygons.

PPSSPP: available on app store. Not able to access file system/SD, can only access /android/data/org.ppsspp.ppsspp/files folder. Root access is needed to write to this folder. **There is no attached program for OPEN_DOCUMENT_TREE so anytime an app needs you to "pick a folder" using the formerly available documentsui framework you're going to be out of luck.** Runs isos better than Retroarch.

Duckstation: not available on app store, has an unsupported build on their official site which works. Suffers from same "documentsui problem" as PPSSPP but allows users to type in a path which allows access to SD card/filesystem. Runs isos better than retroarch.

Other notes:

-device reports support for armabi-v7a 32-bit. Unless i'm mistaken, this means though it was advertised as "64-bit" it will never be able to run 64-bit code in user space. So it's essentially obsolete, though i'm open to corrections on this. EDIT: Busybox reports system architecture as armv81, which supports 64 bit..

-as a possible result, google app store offerings for the A7 firmware are currently much more limited than the A4. another possible reason for the reduced offerings is that the A7 firm has a higher target API than the A4

-this also may have something to do with the device's inability to connect to modern OS

-many of the permissions controls on the firmware are disabled, which can make it very hard to debug things (you have 75 apps that are always able to draw over other apps for instance..) However I believe that some of these can be adjusted successfully by directly editing the configs with root access

-The box has an extremely responsive Bluetooth chip and pairs very well with peripherals. Because of this the box could be useful as a low end retro game system, up to gen 3-4, gen 5 with lots of tweaking.

-the box can be used to create a wireless access point, but will not create an open network (desirable for certain applications), only WPA2.

-The box works well with Kodi and is probably best used as a low-load media streamer with a more stable device doing the heavy lifting, rather than a "loadable memory" media player.

-the box defaults to 1080p and runs a lot cooler when not set to 4k.

-when attached to a keyboard, the F keys can be used to navigate to some degree. This is useful while adjusting the UI.

-the EROFS thing is a very interesting detail, don't know much about it yet, but overall I would guess that the box is suffering from bad implementation on this as well as the scoped storage issue left over from android 11.

Not bad, considering just yesterday I was considering tossing this wafer into traffic. Now I'm considering mounting a CPU cooler on it just because that would be hilarious looking:

Just right on that poor little heatsink that's in there LOL

C