Slot Wants Your RG SP to Feel Like 2003 Again
Time for an article I wrote about Slot, an interesting custom firmware made specifically for the Anbernic RG SP. I chatted with its developer K-Wall about where it came from and why it deliberately does things a little differently.
Rather than trying to turn the RG SP into an everything-machine, Slot sticks to the Game Boy family and leans hard into the SP nostalgia: games appear as physical cartridges on your screen, the carousel encourages you to keep a smaller collection, closing the lid saves your game, and even the old stretched GB/GBC display mode is recreated. K-Wall took that attention to detail right down to the sounds, recording himself physically pushing a cartridge into his childhood GBA so that familiar 'thunk' could become part of Slot itself.
We also chat about burnout, his other projects Cannoli and Grout, why Slot started as something he never intended to release publicly, and his very candid approach to using A.I. during development as a tool. If you like the RG SP, unusual CFW projects, or software designed around a very specific bit of hardware rather than endless feature creep, hopefully you’ll enjoy it :)
https://gardinerbryant.com/slot-wants-your-rg-sp-to-feel-like-2003-again/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
8 replies
Oh god, please tell me this is an intentional parody of people who write "could of" lol
Hah!
That’s fair. In my defence, an article like this takes me a good while to put together. I’ll start with the idea, jot down notes, get in touch with the developer and interview them at their convenience, then go through their answers and work out how to build that material into a story that still feels like their experience, using the quotes I like most to help bring it to life.
All the way through that process I’m drafting, redrafting and leaving myself little notes in the article. I tend to get ideas down quickly and tidy them up later; that’s just how I work. Most of the time it all gets cleaned up, but occasionally one of those awkward little notes-to-self survives the edit and sneaks into the finished piece.
That’s what happened here.
I will say, though, you could probably have made the point a little more kindly. I’m not pretending to be some flawless professional journalist. This is a hobby for me, and I do it because I genuinely love gaming, especially handheld gaming. I put a lot of time into these pieces because I care about the people and projects I’m writing about, even if the odd rough edge from my process slips through.
Wasn't trying to be rude or insulting, sorry if it came across that way. I was just flashbanged by it haha. Out there in the vast steppes of the internet you frequently see the "could of" mistake, and I think this is the first time I've seen the inverse
Kind have?
I'll give it a shot. I think my SP has a few other systems right now - GG, NGPC, and Lynx - but it's mostly just for GBA.
Let me know what you think!
Just finished setting it up and giving it a little go. I need to get used to the shortcuts.
But really liking it so far. I limited myself to 5 games each for GB and GBC, and 6 for GBA. Using the cart studio was fun and easy and takes it from "Oh, neat" to "Damn, that's nice." I hadn't even heard of BaseOS before this. I couldn't believe how fast it boots.
I do wish there were single SD instructions because 2 cards seems like overkill.
My only REAL issue so far though is my translated copy of Cave Noire just reboots whenever I press Start on the title screen. I'll probably try an untranslated version later.
That’s fair! I collect the originals too, although I’m more partial to the non-SP models, especially once they’ve been modded. But what I miss on the real hardware is save states, fast-forward, upscaling, and all the other modern conveniences you quickly get spoiled by. For roughly the price of one EverDrive (lovely things though they are) I can buy a very solid modern interpretation, throw every game I actually want on it, and have them loading instantly. Nostalgia is great; nostalgia with quality-of-life features is even better.
As for the A.I. side, also fair. I was fully expecting the pitchforks to come out over that bit. But after interviewing somewhere around 70 developers in the handheld scene, I’ve seen plenty of people who have been coding for decades use A.I. as exactly that: a tool. Sometimes it gives them breathing room, sometimes it gets them through the boring parts, sometimes it lets them spend more time on the bits they actually care about. I completely understand why the subject is sore, but gaming in 2026 pretending developers aren’t already using these tools feels a little like angrily shouting at the tide for coming in.