Analogue Pocket

Plays all Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games out of the box. FPGA hardware just like the Super Nt, Mega Sg and Analogue Nt before it. It also has a built in music sequencer. The screen capability is pretty damn nice.

It will play Neo Geo Pocket (Color), Game Gear, and Lynx via hardware adapters. It will also eventually have a dock available so you can play these games on your TV.

It’s a pretty impressive all-in-one device. $199 will be the price (plus their ridiculous shipping costs presumably… that will make it like $229 in total) and I think it might be worth it. There are two FPGAs inside so you can tinker with the other one (or use stuff tinkered by others).

Yes, looking forward to this one.

Hot. So much of what I care about is DS though; dunno if lacking that (which is obviously totally understandable) makes this worthwhile to me.

I’m not sold on it.

The Nt, Super Nt, and Mega Sg had an easy and meaningful use case to sell themselves on - “play your original console games on your HDTV without them looking like ass.” The Pocket doesn’t meaningfully fill a use case that isn’t already covered, though - people can already play Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges on a convenient and portable device called the Game Boy Advance. (More specifically, in my case, the late-model improved-backlight Game Boy Advance SP.) The additional capabilities all require you to purchase even more hardware from Analogue (note that all the hardware adapters for other systems and the Dock are sold separately) and/or are super niche compared to the base functionality of “playing Game Boy games” that you can get from a GBA SP for a fraction of the price. The larger screen is cool, but the device itself is enormous - it’s the size of a Switch minus Joy-Cons, and over twice the size of a GBA SP - and doesn’t have a hinge, so portability is significantly worse than the real deal. Even the Dock is nothing new, since the Game Boy Player came out sixteen years ago, and someone seriously looking at the price point of the Analogue Pocket plus the Dock can certainly afford a GameCube, a Game Boy Player, and a high-end HDMI adapter.

I think you’re overlooking that it has the second FPGA chip in there as well as the Micro SD card slot (not to mention a really nice screen). While it will definitely do what a late gen GBA does as far as what it plays, it’s likely to be able to do a whole lot more once people get their hands on it.

They also have to make a profit on the device itself since they don’t sell games. The now standard Analogue pricing of $199 seems reasonable given all that’s offered here.

This is slick. My nitpicks: For a device this large, a clamshell design for portability would have been nice. I’d also like to see the weight and battery life to get an idea for exactly how portable it’s going to be.

It’s going to be harder to convince me to purchase this sight unseen like I did the Super Nt mainly because the screen and the controls need to be really good. This is a little different than a console connected to a TV because of those quality of life features you didn’t have to deal with on their other devices.

That said, they’ve been really good at this stuff so far, so I’m hoping it turns out as good as it looks.

Yikes, ~400$ CDN after fees. I’ll definitely be looking at reviews, but I don’t think I have enough gameboy carts for that price.

I was expecting something more like the revo thingy wumpus posted about. This giant gameboy is cool too.

Can anyone explain to me what this “FPGA” and “cores” stuff means?

An FPGA ( Field-programmable gate array ) is a type of chip that is configurable to act as other types of chips.

A ‘core’ is a definition for a chip or set of chips to load into a FPGA.

The definition is written in a HDL (Hardware Description Language), usually something like Verilog.

The definition contains enough information to either build a physical circuit or to configure a FPGA to act as one.

FPGAs come in various sizes depending on how fast they are and how much room they have for cores.

People have developed cores to act as various retro chips.

Analogue’s own previous products include consoles that use FPGAs to act as other classic Sega and Nintendo consoles.

A common FPGA based retro-computing platform is MiSTer. See their wiki for a list of cores that it can run, for MiSTer these include: several classic computers, consoles and arcade machines.

As an example here is the core for MiSTer to act as an Atari 2600.

TLDR: It is like having the actual original CPU available rather than using software emulation.

Thanks, Paul! So the first core in the Pocket will run all the devices they’re saying it’ll support, and then they put a second one in there that devs can play with to make custom cores. Or, presumably, make the Pocket emulate other legacy devices as well. Which means as a user of a Pocket, I can probably go on the internet and get an HDL that will make my Pocket a C64 machine, if that’s what I want.

You know you could just buy a DS for cheaper, right?

That’s a reasonable expectation for the Analogue Pocket. In fact, it’ll probably happen within days of its release.

Yes that sounds about right. I am not sure if you will have access to reprogram both FPGAs or not officially but I am sure people will figure things out pretty quickly once it ships.

Note that while Analogue claim you can’t use roms with their hardware all their previous devices have had unofficial firmware that lets you do just that released pretty quickly.

Yes, but is it in SEXY BLACK with WAY TOO MANY PIXELS in the display?

wumpus had a weird hate for Analogue’s products.

Pocket will be expensive, and you’ll have to pay up front when you pre-order. That’s how it’s worked with Super Nt and Mega Sg before it. Their shipping costs are astronomical in 2019 (or presumably 2020), too. Premium product with premium fees.

Remember how they opened up preorders and were bought out by bots in minutes? Well, here’s some good news that got buried: Analogue Pocket pre-orders will return in 2021, with anti-bot and scalper measures - Polygon

Hopefully this means I’ll have a chance to get one.

I fail to see the appeal of this thing in a world where most of my gameboy batteries and some of my GBA ones are starting to fail, and where the individual games are now more expensive than the old consoles you need to play them.
Ah, the GB and GBC run on non rechargeable batteries, I guess there is that.

These are on sale right now. It’s possible your order won’t ship til 2023 (you can cancel) but I went ahead and ordered this time. Fingers crossed I’m in the first group in 2022.

It’s not totally my bag, but the reviews of the shipping systems arriving with people now are absolutely excellent and I’m very happy with Mega Sg and Super Nt, so I’m in with Pocket now too.

I ordered one too! If I end up in group C (2023) I’ll likely just cancel.