You may have seen me praise an upcoming Android frontend called Socket on our website and across our two latest YouTube videos, and it's for good reason: it's a fun, not-so-serious frontend for emulators that prioritises cartridge and disc art.
It organises your ROMs neatly, while automatically pulling cartridge and disc art, allowing you to playfully scan through your library, and even add minor customisations to your cartridges and discs, such as transparent shells or holographic looks.
The developer behind this frontend is working hard, and even though it's still in Alpha, locked behind a Patreon paywall that costs just $6 or so, its continouslly getting some pretty hefty updates. This time adding an arrow of new gaming console support so you can show off your library even further. Update 0.3.2 features:
- Game Boy and Game Boy Color platform support.
- Xbox and Xbox 360 platform support.
- New cartridge finishes: Metallic, Glitter, Opaque, Translucent, and Clear. With lots of colors.
- New render scale slider added in Settings > Tweaks (default 0.85)
Changed
- Material and Foil pickers in Customize now display as a dropdown.
- Materials have been reworked, to allow for auto-config when scraping.
- Materials are now split in "Material" (in the physical sense) and color.
Fixed
- Launching a second game while an emulator (e.g. RetroArch) was already running from a previous launch showed a black screen instead of the new game.
- Various QoL fixes
As mentioned, you can get access to depmots Alpha via his Patreon. If you want to see it in action on some of my own handhelds, make sure to watch our Retroid Pocket Nova review and our KONKR Pocket Advance review!
