danklammer/minui-zero

MinUI Zero is a low power version of MinUI, a simple menu firmware for two handheld game consoles, the TrimUI Brick and the TrimUI Smart Pro. It keeps the same fast, no frills experience as the original MinUI but tunes the hardware underneath so each game only draws as much power as it actually needs, aiming for cooler play, longer battery life, and smoother frame pacing without any settings to manage. Installing it means downloading a release zip and copying it onto a FAT32 formatted SD card, either as a fresh install or an update over an existing MinUI card. The project publishes measured results against stock MinUI on real hardware: gameplay runs a few degrees cooler, Game Boy battery life rises from about six hours to seven and a half, and certain demanding games like Bloody Roar II hold a locked sixty frames per second at stock clock speeds instead of needing an overclock. The core trick is a frame aware layer sitting above the normal Linux CPU scaling. It watches whether a game is holding its target frame rate, lowers the CPU speed ceiling when there is spare headroom, and raises it again within about a second if a demanding scene needs more power, so there is no manual CPU speed setting anymore, each game gets tuned automatically and continuously. A separate optional tool called Optimize CPU spends about ninety minutes measuring each individual chip's real voltage limits while the device charges, which the author reports cuts CPU power draw by roughly twenty percent at the same clock speeds. Pressing the power button suspends the whole system to memory rather than leaving it idling, so it wakes almost instantly with near zero power draw while asleep. The firmware deliberately leaves out box art, wifi, an app store, achievements, and themes, the same minimalism as upstream MinUI, and the README compares it directly against NextUI, a more feature rich fork of the same base, for readers deciding which one fits their taste. Ready to play consoles include Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, and PlayStation, with several more available by creating the matching ROM folder. The project is described as unofficial personal firmware provided as is, without warranty.