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 :)
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.