Slot - the best retrogaming frontend

I'm always on the lookout for new gaming frontends and have recently discovered one for the GameBoy Advance called slot, it's designed for use on the Anbernic RG SP but works on other Anbernic devices too.  GBA is it's main system although GameBoy and GameBoy Color games can also be added.  And having tried it for a couple of weeks now I can honestly say it is an absolute game-changer for GBA on the Anbernic RG SP.

Firstly, as you can see from the image it displays each GBA game as the actual cartridge, to start playing your selected game simply press 'A' the cartridge disappears into the slot at the bottom of the screen and uses the actual sound effect of a GBA cartridge being inserted which is a really nice touch, the creator of slot recorded it from an actual GBA!  To exit the game simply press and hold the Menu button and out it pops back into the carousel.

Installing and setting up slot is really simple, firstly you require the BaseOS firmware which can be obtained from https://github.com/pvaibhav/BaseOS - flash this onto a blank SD card, put it in your RG SP and wait until the message is displayed on the screen that a frontend is needed.  Now switch the machine off, remove the SD card and put it in a PC or laptop.  Next download slot from https://github.com/BrandonKowalski/slot extract the zip file and copy this over to the SD card, then it's simply a case of copying over your GBA, GB and GBC roms.

But there's one more thing to be done and that's to add the labels for the cartridges, which can be done via a feature on the slot website at https://slot-cfw.fyi called Studio, while keeping the SD card in the PC or laptop select it in Studio which will then scan all the games you've added and attempt to add the labels for them (it does a pretty good job of this actually), if there are any missing then simply select it and the built-in database will, in most cases display the required label, select it and move onto the next one.  In my experience of this there were only three games I could get the labels for and had to search for and make my own which wasn't surprising as the three missing ones were for Pokemom rom hacks.  Once you have all your labels, simply press 'write to SD card', safely eject the card, insert it back into your RG SP, switch it on and it should look like the image at the top of this post.

There are a number of other things that can be done in slot, pressing up or down on the d-pad moves along the shelf from one letter to the next, pressing 'Y' saves a game in your Favourites list, pressing start allows you to choose which GBA emulator to use, and pressing L1/R1 switches between systems if you've GB or GBC games installed as well.  An option is also available in the Settings to display a 'Recently Played' list.

As I said at the start of this post slot really has changed how I play GameBoy Advance, it really is a joy to use, it's the best retrogaming frontend I've tried and I can't recommend it enough!