slot.advance 1.0.0

slot.advance 1.0.0 for the Anbernic RG SP (2026) (720 x 480). It is not for the RG35XX SP. The previous release is slot.advance 0.5.0.

Real sleep. Instant resume. Super-efficient standby. And now RetroAchievements, online and offline, when you want it. It stays off unless you switch it on, and everything else, sleep, wake, Wi-Fi and Syncthing included, works as it did on 0.5.0.

Upgrading: download slot.advance-1.0.0-rg-sp.zip, unzip it, and copy the contents of its System folder into System on your games card (SD2), as in the README's upgrade steps. Your games, saves, states and settings are not touched. New install: follow the README's new install steps.

RetroAchievements

Open Settings > RetroAchievements, switch it on and log in with your RetroAchievements user name and password (Wi-Fi needs to be on and connected). Your password is sent once and never stored. Achievements are Softcore, on mGBA, for GBA, Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, so save states, rewind and fast-forward all stay available. When you earn one, a one-line notice appears at the top of the screen.

Start a game online once. The first time you play a game with achievements, slot.advance fetches its achievements from RetroAchievements, so Wi-Fi must be connected. After that it keeps them on the card and the game earns achievements offline too. Switching RetroAchievements on, or logging in, while a game is running doesn't track that game: tracking starts with the next game you start. How it works.

Offline, and safe

Achievements you earn offline are written to the card before the notice appears, kept through sleep, the timed shutdown and Power Off, and sent automatically the next time Wi-Fi connects, dated when you earned them where that can be traced (RetroAchievements accepts up to 14 days back). Progress toward an achievement carries on after sleep and after the game resumes at power-on. Log Out keeps your unsent achievements on the card, and each account's records are kept apart.

RetroAchievements never runs while the RG SP sleeps, never delays sleep or saving, never switches Wi-Fi on, and does nothing at all while it's off.

Battery

Asleep, nothing changes: 1.0.0 keeps 0.5.0's hardware sleep, which used about 2% of the battery an hour in two 8-hour sleeps on 0.5.0. While playing, RetroAchievements used an estimated 9 mA more (1.8%) in one matched test, within measurement noise. The measurements.

Good to know

• No Hardcore mode, leaderboards or achievement list on the handheld, and no tracking on gpSP or during link play.
• Achievements sent more than 14 days after you earned them are dated 14 days before sending, RetroAchievements' limit.
• Your login token is saved on the games card unencrypted (not your password), so look after the card.
• The limitations of 0.5.0 still apply, listed in the release notes.

If anything goes wrong, copy slot.log and slot.log.1 (and, if there is one, the crash folder's cores.log and newest slot-….log) from the games card before powering on again, and open a bug report with the files attached. Never attach Config/retroachievements/account.txt: it holds your login token.

Emulation by mGBA (MPL-2.0) and gpSP (GPL-2.0); Syncthing 2.1.6 (MPL-2.0) and rcheevos 12.5.0 (MIT), unmodified; Mozilla's root certificates through webpki-roots 1.0.11 (CDLA-Permissive-2.0, derived from the Common CA Database). Achievements by RetroAchievements; the design builds on @pvaibhav's slot fork. Licences and patches, gpSP's source, and where to get mGBA's and Syncthing's source are in System/licenses/. slot.advance is GPL-3.0, based on slot by Brandon T. Kowalski. Full release notes · User guide.

slot.advance 0.5.0

slot.advance 0.5.0 for the Anbernic RG SP (2026) (720 x 480). It is not for the RG35XX SP. The previous release is slot.advance 0.4.2.

Real sleep. Instant resume. Super-efficient standby. And now, when you want them: Wi-Fi, Syncthing for your saves, and an in-game menu. Wi-Fi stays off unless you switch it on, so out of the box your RG SP sleeps, wakes and saves battery as it did on 0.4.2.

Upgrading: download slot.advance-0.5.0-rg-sp.zip, unzip it, and copy the contents of its System folder into System on your games card (SD2), as in the README's upgrade steps. Your games, saves, states and settings are not touched. New install: follow the README's new install steps. If you had added wifi=on to Config/slot.state for link play, it carries over as Wi-Fi On.

In-game menu

Tap MENU in a game for Resume, States, Settings and Exit Game, with the game paused. Settings is the full menu you know from the carousel, minus Date & Time and GB Palettes (and the other platform's shader), and the shader, colour correction and fast-forward rows change the game you're playing. Close the lid with the menu open and it's still there when you come back. Double tap MENU still opens your save states, and holding it still saves and exits. Adapted from upstream slot's in-game menu.

Optional Wi-Fi

Settings > Network: switch Wi-Fi on (it starts at the next restart), pick a network and type its password on the on-screen keyboard. Saved networks join by themselves, the clock is set from the internet, and a small icon on the carousel shows the connection. Every sleep still comes first: your game is saved, then Wi-Fi disconnects and goes down before the RG SP sleeps, and it reconnects in the background when you open the lid.

Syncthing for Saves and States

Turn on Syncthing in the Network menu, open the address shown on the Web Interface screen in a browser on the same Wi-Fi, and pair the RG SP with your computer or home server. Your Saves and States then stay in step whenever both are awake. Each RG SP gets its own random password for the web interface, shown on screen, with a one-button reset. Syncing is not a backup: keep a copy of your saves elsewhere too.

Battery

With Wi-Fi off, nothing changes: about 2 to 3.2% an hour asleep in our extended tests (0.4.x, Wi-Fi off). With Wi-Fi on, 0.5.0 takes the Wi-Fi interface down before each sleep, and in development tests sleeps prepared that way stayed close to Wi-Fi off (an 8-hour sleep read 2% an hour). While you play, Wi-Fi and Syncthing cost about 13% more current in one test. The measurements.

Save safety

Fixes from upstream slot and mGBA, found in a final check before this release:

• Games with a 128 KB flash save, the Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald, FireRed and LeafGreen games among them, could save into the wrong half of the chip after loading a state. Fixed.
• An empty suspend slot or save state crashed slot.advance at every start with that game seated. It is now set aside and the game starts fresh.
• A save the card failed to read was treated as missing and then overwritten. Now the game starts without it, the red "Can't write to SD card" band shows, and nothing for that game is written until you take the cart out and put it in again.
• After link play, the joining handheld saved the host's game over its own. Its own save is now left alone until the cart is put in again.
• Game Boy games on an MBC2 cartridge, such as Kirby's Pinball Land, no longer crash on their first save.

Fixed

• Restart could leave the RG SP dark while the Wi-Fi driver was loaded, until POWER was held. Restart and Power off now unload the driver first, within 5 seconds. From upstream slot, adapted.

Good to know

• WPA2 and open networks are supported. WPA3-only, enterprise and hidden networks aren't; most routers can offer WPA2 alongside WPA3.
• Syncthing works on your local network only, while the RG SP is awake.
• Files copied onto the card from a Mac through an SD card reader showed shifted modified times, which matters only if the same save was changed in two places before syncing. Details.
• Network keys are saved on the games card unencrypted, so look after the card.
• If you join a link session, your own game isn't saved, and save states are refused, until you take the cart out and put it in again. There's no on-screen reminder yet. Details.
• If the red "Can't write to SD card" band appears, stop playing that game and see what to do.
• The download is now about 15 MB, because it includes Syncthing.

If anything goes wrong, copy slot.log and slot.log.1 (and, if there is one, the crash folder's cores.log and newest slot-….log) from the games card before powering on again, and open a bug report with the files attached.

Emulation by mGBA (MPL-2.0) and gpSP (GPL-2.0); Syncthing 2.1.6 (MPL-2.0), unmodified. Their licences and patches, gpSP's source, and where to get mGBA's and Syncthing's source are in System/licenses/. slot.advance is GPL-3.0, based on slot by Brandon T. Kowalski. Full release notes · User guide.

slot.advance 0.4.2

slot.advance 0.4.2 for the Anbernic RG SP (2026) (720 x 480). It is not for the RG35XX SP. The previous release is slot.advance 0.4.1.

Upgrading: download slot.advance-0.4.2-rg-sp.zip, unzip it, and copy the contents of its System folder into System on your games card (SD2), as in the README's upgrade steps. Your games, saves, states and settings are not touched. New install: follow the README's new install steps.

A maintenance release of fixes from upstream slot, each checked against slot.advance and adapted where needed. Sleep, wake, the lid, the sleep timer, Wi-Fi and power management are unchanged from 0.4.1.

Save states you can rely on when the clock is wrong

If the clock had gone backwards (set back in Set Clock, or reset after the battery ran flat), a new save state could vanish: with all five slots full, it was saved, "saved" was shown, and it was deleted straight away to make room. A new state is now always placed after the newest one, so it is first in the switcher and the oldest is the one replaced.

Rewind does about half the work

mGBA was asked to build every state twice, and rewind takes one every second frame. The size is now remembered while a game runs (0.73 ms down to 0.39 ms per state, timed on a computer). States saved to the card are still exactly the size mGBA reports.

Steady frame rate when muted

After 3 seconds of silence slot lets go of the speaker, and its timing then ran slightly slow, which could hold the game back. It now keeps time to a deadline. On the RG SP, a minute of muted play showed no stutter and the sound came back straight away each time.

Crash diagnostics

If slot.advance itself crashes, the RG SP starts it again within a few seconds, and the details are now kept: a crash folder on the games card holds a log line for each crash, the log of each of the last five crashed sessions, and the latest crash's core and memory map. slot.log also gets a line naming the signal, the thread and where it happened. Before, a crash left almost nothing to go on. slot.log now also times each step of a game launch.

gpSP stability

gpSP could fail to start if memory near it was crowded at boot. Its code cache is now part of the core itself, so it is always there.

Validation

Checked on the device with 0.4.2-beta.1, which has the same code apart from the version and the crash line's thread label: save states (including with the clock a day behind), rewind, fast-forward, muted play, gpSP, three lid closes, a timed shutdown and restore, and a deliberate crash with automatic restart. Details.

If anything goes wrong, copy slot.log and slot.log.1 (and, if there is one, the crash folder's cores.log and newest slot-….log) from the games card before powering on again, and open a bug report with the files attached.

Emulation by mGBA (MPL-2.0) and gpSP (GPL-2.0). Their licences, patches and gpSP's source are in System/licenses/. slot.advance is GPL-3.0, based on slot by Brandon T. Kowalski. Full release notes.

slot.advance 0.4.1

slot.advance 0.4.1 for the Anbernic RG SP (2026) (720 x 480). It is not for the RG35XX SP. The previous release is slot.advance 0.4.0.

Upgrading: download slot.advance-0.4.1-rg-sp.zip, unzip it, and copy the contents of its System folder into System on your games card (SD2), as in the README's upgrade steps. Your games, saves, states and settings are not touched. New install: follow the README's new install steps.

35% less resume time, with Wi-Fi off

With Wi-Fi off (the default), the game's first frame now appears a median of 0.81 s after the kernel's first logged resume marker, against 1.25 s in 0.4.0: 443 ms sooner, 35.4% less measured time. The time runs from that marker to the first rendered frame (11 wakes on 0.4.1-beta.1, which has the same runtime source as 0.4.1 apart from the version; 10 on 0.4.0). It leaves out the unlogged moment the lid starts to open, and it isn't the kernel's total device-resume time.

• Why it was slower: switching Wi-Fi off unloads its driver and cuts power to the radio, but the kernel kept the radio's SDIO card registered, and every wake waited about a second for it to time out.
• What changed: once, at start-up, straight after unloading the Wi-Fi driver, slot.advance removes that stale card, as BaseOS does before loading the driver.
• What didn't: the suspend itself, the lid and timer wakes, the radio's power state, and wifi=on (wakes there take about 0.82 s on both versions; no improvement is claimed).

Validation

Checked on the device with 0.4.1-beta.1, which has the same code: first-frame timing passed; lid closes during the Wi-Fi shutdown completed, with the start-up race below accepted; the 0.4.0 sleep checklist completed; and a 7 hour 37 minute sleep passed for reliability, with no unexpected wakes and the radio unpowered throughout.

Battery: whether 0.4.1 uses the same standby battery as 0.4.0 is inconclusive. Its extended sleep went from 99% to 75% in 7 hours 37 minutes, against 94% to 74% in 7 hours 46 minutes on 0.4.0, but the two started at different charge levels and the gauge behaves differently near full. Across three extended sleeps on 0.4.x (0.4.0-beta.3, 0.4.0 and 0.4.1-beta.1), the gauge showed about 2 to 3.2% an hour, against about 7% for 0.3.0 (semi-stock) software standby. These are observed gauge readings, not a guaranteed range. How it was measured.

Known limitations

• Start-up race: if the lid is closed at almost exactly the moment Wi-Fi switches off, about 20 seconds after power-on, the stale card may not be removed. Sleep and wake still work normally; that session's wakes simply take as long as in 0.4.0, and the next power-on removes it as usual.
• Rapidly flicking the lid closed and open can occasionally leave the screen dark with the lid open. Deliberate stress testing reproduced this in both 0.4.0 and 0.4.1. Normal wake behaviour is unaffected, and closing and reopening the lid restores the game without losing progress.

If anything goes wrong, copy slot.log and slot.log.1 from the games card before powering on again, and open a bug report with both files attached.

Emulation by mGBA (MPL-2.0) and gpSP (GPL-2.0). Their licences, patches and gpSP's source are in System/licenses/. slot.advance is GPL-3.0, based on slot by Brandon T. Kowalski. Full release notes.

slot.advance 0.4.0

slot.advance 0.4.0 for the Anbernic RG SP (2026) (720 x 480). It is not for the RG35XX SP. The previous release is slot.advance 0.3.0.

Upgrading: download slot.advance-0.4.0-rg-sp.zip, unzip it, and copy the contents of its System folder into System on your games card (SD2), as in the README's upgrade steps. Your games, saves, states and settings are not touched. New install: follow the README's new install steps.

New in 0.4.0

• Real hardware sleep. Closing the lid saves the game, then suspends the RG SP (2026) to RAM. Opening the lid carries on from the same moment, with nothing reloaded.
• Settings > Sleep: 3 min, 15 min, 30 min (default), 1 hr, 2 hr, 8 hr. When the time runs out with the lid shut, it shuts down cleanly and the next power-on restores the game.
• Battery: six unused USB host controllers and Wi-Fi are switched off. Link play needs wifi=on in Config/slot.state. Lid-closed standby current fell by about 72% (about 250 mA to about 70 mA). Asleep, the battery gauge showed about 2 to 2.6% an hour over two overnight sleeps: 98% to 82% in 8 hours on 0.4.0-beta.3, and 94% to 74% in 7 hours 46 minutes on 0.4.0. (Corrected 16 October 2026: this first gave only the beta.3 figure, about 2% an hour.) How it was measured.
• Optional game titles: Settings > Screen > Show Game Titles (off by default).
• About screen with the version, the number of games, free space on the games card, the battery, slotadvance.com and the credits.
• A game that could not be saved when the lid closed is never shut down by the sleep timer.
• POWER with the lid shut no longer lights the screen.
• Striped slot.advance boot logo, and the build's version and commit written as the first line of slot.log.

Known limitation

Rapidly flicking the lid closed and open can occasionally leave the screen dark with the lid open. Deliberate stress testing reproduced this in both 0.4.0 and 0.4.1. Normal wake behaviour is unaffected, and closing and reopening the lid restores the game without losing progress.

If anything goes wrong, copy slot.log and slot.log.1 from the games card before powering on again, and open a bug report with both files attached.

Emulation by mGBA (MPL-2.0) and gpSP (GPL-2.0). Their licences, patches and gpSP's source are in System/licenses/. slot.advance is GPL-3.0, based on slot by Brandon T. Kowalski. Full release notes.

slot.advance 0.4.0-beta.3

Beta. slot.advance 0.4.0-beta.3 for the Anbernic RG SP (2026) (720 x 480). It is not for the RG35XX SP. It is undergoing hardware validation, and stable 0.4.0 will follow successful testing. The previous stable release is slot.advance 0.3.0.

Download slot-advance-0.4.0-beta.3-rg-sp.zip, unzip it, and copy the contents of its System folder into System on your games card (SD2), as in the README's upgrade steps. Your games, saves, states and settings are not touched.

Fixed since 0.4.0-beta.2

• After rapid lid flicks, opening the lid could leave the screen dark for 4 to 5 seconds before the game came back. The lid driver sometimes records "shut" after a wake even though the lid is open. slot.advance now checks the lid sensor's raw level in that case, and slot.log notes each time it does.

New in 0.4.0

• Real hardware sleep. Closing the lid saves the game, then suspends the RG SP (2026) to RAM. Opening the lid carries on from the same moment, with nothing reloaded.
• Settings > Sleep: 3 min, 15 min, 30 min (default), 1 hr, 2 hr, 8 hr. When the time runs out with the lid shut, it shuts down cleanly and the next power-on restores the game.
• Battery: six unused USB host controllers and Wi-Fi are switched off. Link play needs wifi=on in Config/slot.state. In preliminary development testing, lid-closed standby current fell by about 72% (about 250 mA to about 70 mA). That figure comes from an experiment reproducing this configuration, not a battery test of this build. How it was measured.
• Optional game titles: Settings > Screen > Show Game Titles (off by default).
• A game that could not be saved when the lid closed is never shut down by the sleep timer.
• Striped slot.advance boot logo, and the build's version and commit written as the first line of slot.log.

Still being validated

Plugging in or unplugging the charger while asleep, rumble and headphones after many sleeps, and rapid lid flicks with this fix. Sleep and resume from inside a game, and the timed shutdown, have already worked on the device. If anything goes wrong, copy slot.log and slot.log.1 from the games card before powering on again, and open a bug report with both files attached.

Emulation by mGBA (MPL-2.0) and gpSP (GPL-2.0). Their licences, patches and gpSP's source are in System/licenses/. slot.advance is GPL-3.0, based on slot by Brandon T. Kowalski. Full release notes.

slot advance 0.4.0-beta.2

Pre-release for testers. slot advance 0.4.0-beta.2 for the Anbernic RG SP (2026) (720 x 480). It is not for the RG35XX SP. The current stable release is still slot advance 0.3.0; this beta becomes 0.4.0 once it has been validated on the device.

Download slot-advance-0.4.0-beta.2-rg-sp.zip, unzip it, and copy the contents of its System folder into System on your games card (SD2), as in the README's upgrade steps. Your games, saves, states and settings are not touched. To go back, copy System/slot from the 0.3.0 download over it.

New in 0.4.0

• Real hardware sleep. Closing the lid saves the game, then suspends the RG SP (2026) to RAM. Opening the lid carries on from the same moment, with nothing reloaded.
• Settings > Sleep: 3 min, 15 min, 30 min (default), 1 hr, 2 hr, 8 hr. When the time runs out with the lid shut, it shuts down cleanly and the next power-on restores the game.
• Battery: six unused USB host controllers and Wi-Fi are switched off. Link play needs wifi=on in Config/slot.state. In preliminary development testing, lid-closed standby current fell by about 72% (about 250 mA to about 70 mA). That figure comes from an experiment reproducing this configuration, not a battery test of this build. How it was measured.
• Optional game titles: Settings > Screen > Show Game Titles (off by default).
• Striped slot advance boot logo, and the build's version and commit written as the first line of slot.log.

Fixed since 0.4.0-beta.1 (not published)

• A running game whose emulator core failed to provide its state when the lid closed was counted as saved, so the sleep timer could shut down and lose progress. It is now treated as unsaved, and the device keeps sleeping and retries the save.

Still being validated

Repeated sleep and resume from inside a game (with sound and controls afterwards), plugging in or unplugging the charger while asleep, and a timed shutdown followed by the game restoring at boot. A possible glitch when opening and closing the lid rapidly was reported on beta.1 and is being investigated. If anything goes wrong, copy slot.log and slot.log.1 from the games card before powering on again.

Emulation by mGBA (MPL-2.0) and gpSP (GPL-2.0). Their licences, patches and gpSP's source are in System/licenses/. slot advance is GPL-3.0, based on slot by Brandon T. Kowalski. Full release notes.

slot advance 0.3.0

Version note: this release was first published as v3. slot advance now uses semantic versioning, so v3 is 0.3.0 and the next release will be 0.4.0. The advance-v3 tag, the download link and the zip are unchanged.

slot advance 0.3.0 (v3) for the Anbernic RG SP (720 x 480). Download slot-advance-v3-rg-sp.zip, unzip it, and copy everything inside onto your games card (SD2). Full steps for new installs, upgrades and going back are in the README.

What's new

• Each game remembers its own shader, colour correction, fast-forward speed and fast-forward sound (Config/game_profiles.txt).
• SELECT + L2 / R2 sets this game's fast-forward speed; SELECT + X turns its fast-forward sound on or off.
• After a reboot, the carousel opens on the game you played last, in the category you started it from.
• Quiet low-battery banners at 15% and 10%; the 5% shutdown is unchanged.
• The screen stops being redrawn while the lid is shut or after a POWER tap; it still powers off after 3 minutes. Battery effect not yet measured.
• New slot. ADVANCE boot logo, shown from the second power-on.

Also included

Recents, Favourites, five save states per game with an Up / Down switcher, and delete that asks first.

The download holds no games, saves or settings, so copying it over an existing card keeps yours.

Emulation by mGBA (MPL-2.0) and gpSP (GPL-2.0), unchanged from slot v1.5.0. Their licences, patches and gpSP's source are in System/licenses/. slot advance is GPL-3.0, based on slot by Brandon T. Kowalski.