Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/17/analogue-pocket.html
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I wonder if it might not be ever so slightly premature to take this product description at face value. I can’t remember for sure but I feel like there may have been one or even two products like this that turned out be less amazing than promised.
Surely all pockets are analogue, unless you have your hands in them?
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As far as I can tell, all of Analogue products have been well received. Although I believe that some of the cartridge adapters for the Nt Mini have yet to be released. Still, they have a proven track record.
Seems similar in spirit to Panic’s Play Date.
So true, except this Analogue Pocket is digital, so wtf is up with its name?
ETA: I see, it’s from a company called Analogue…which makes digital products. Is their name supposed to be some sort of hipster irony?
Analog(ue) has more than one definition, and given that this company makes compatible / clone gaming devices, it seems like a pretty fitting name.
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I (obviously) hadn’t thought of that!
Gloves are Digital. Mittens are Analogue.
I just hate to say this… but it seems like this costs about $150 too much. I mean, it looks like nice hardware, but Nintendo emulators are cheap. You can get handheld emulators full of pirate roms that you can load more pirate roms onto via SD card for much, much less…
We have the Analogue Super Nt. It will probably be better than promised, based on the build quality and functionality we’ve experienced with it.
No, seriously, bought it for my wife because she grew up playing the Super Nintendo (I skipped all that gen.), and it’s proven nothing short of amazing.
Yes, you can do that. But none of the devices Analogue makes are really marketed towards the same group of people. Preservationists, folk like me who mostly missed out on that gen. but who, through weird turns of a bizarre career, now have questions about game design and want to experience hardware differently, folk who don’t want/can’t afford to mod their own SNESes (a Super Nt is roughly comparable in cost and much less hassle), and FPGA enthusiasts figure prominently of those who would buy this.
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Other than the playdate’s handle and the Analogue Pocket’s cart slot, the key difference seems to be the Pocket’s very high-resolution color display. This comes with one clear cost – $50 more expensive – and an implicit one: lower battery life.
Well, and that one is a self-consciously nintendo / apple-inspired console for new games, while the other is fanboi retrogaming spec-sheet porn.
Am I being mean? Probably, I am mean after all. I guess it hinges on this alleged DAW, because there’s certainly nothing that an HD display or FPGA can contribute to any of the console platforms they mention. And why two FPGAs? Why not one bigger one? Or (assuming they’re for audio processing), one of the many powerful, efficient, effort-saving DSPs available?
Unless you can still get CRTs (many can’t, or don’t want to because CRTs aren’t exactly convenient), that’s not strictly true.
Plugging any of these older consoles into a modern HD display looks somewhere between bad and terrible, depending. At best: not great. At least nothing about the experience makes me want to play video games on older hardware.
Analog output from older consoles isn’t handled well, CRTs aren’t always easy to come by, combined with the fact that fewer HDTVs even have analog inputs any more, means it can be useful to have some sort of native (with a few caveats inherent in HD media) HMDI output.
Don’t know about anything of the other things you mention. Other hardware Analogue has shipped has undergone a few rounds of updates which fixed “hardware” bugs, increasing compatibility and accuracy.
If it’s not possible to reconfigure DSPs like FPGAs can, then that could be why.
The second FPGA is for developers to port their own cores.
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