Analogue Pocket

[wakka]

Jelly! I'm in the second wave of orders that went to the 'Preparing' status. With the first wave now shipping, I'm hoping that mine will ship by the end of November (people in the first wave who have had their units shipped first switched to 'Preparing' status around 3 weeks ago, so that's my best estimate anyway).

[Cepp]

The Super GameBoy core is so ****ing cool, especially with the way you can use it with real carts.

[QualityChimp]

I promise this isn't a dig, but I'm curious why a few of you have bought the Analog Pocket, which is able to play legit carts, but you're using it like any other handheld emulator crammed with illegal ROMs?

What's made you go down this more expensive route for handheld emulation?

Did you plan to be good, but once the hacking started it was too good to resist?
Did you always plan to go the hacks/flashcart route and this hardware looks the best on the market?

Just curious!

[jonathan_ingram]

I haven't got one, but plan to at some stage...I was attracted by the FPGA side of the emulation (and subsequent cores being released) and what looks like much nicer build quality than I'm aware of elsewhere

[Cepp]

I wanted both options from the start. I like real carts but priorities are shifting and I don't want to fork out for more expensive games (or another round of insane shipping costs from Analogue).

I don't own any other handheld devices that make handheld games look this good on a small screen, and the system always had a lot of built in promise when it came to cores.

The NGPC is the posterboy for all of the above. Unfortunately there's no core for that yet!

[wakka]

I promise this isn't a dig, but I'm curious why a few of you have bought the Analog Pocket, which is able to play legit carts, but you're using it like any other handheld emulator crammed with illegal ROMs?

What's made you go down this more expensive route for handheld emulation?

Did you plan to be good, but once the hacking started it was too good to resist?
Did you always plan to go the hacks/flashcart route and this hardware looks the best on the market?

Just curious!

Speaking for myself it's not really a moral decision. The vast majority of the games I want to play on these platforms are no longer available legitimately, or I've already paid out for them multiple times. I don't personally draw a moral distinction between playing a ROM and forking out often ridiculous amounts of cash to someone on Ebay in that case.

So, the real carts aspect was never what it was about for me. It's instead about the hardware. So, first of all, the Pocket uses a programmable FPGA. I'm no expert on this but my understanding is that it's fundamentally different to how emulation on a PC, Anbernic, etc, works. Instead of emulating the software you're actually emulating the hardware of the original machine itself, which allows the emulation to be much more accurate. It's the same thing as MiSTER and it's why people go nuts for that rather than simply firing up Snes9x on their PC.

(Someone who knows more about the benefits of FPGA can fill in more here, perhaps!)

The second thing on the hardware side for me is that the Pocket has an outstanding looking screen, coupled with software display filters. So what's exciting about this for me is the way that this allows you to have the games look as they actually would have done on the original vintage displays - but of course with richer colours, no ghosting, much brighter, etc.

So the Pocket has a 1600x900 display, with 615 pixels per inch. This is insanely high even compared to modern top of the range smartphones, which usually top out at around ~400 pixels per inch. The Anbernics and Miyoos by comparison have resolutions of around 640x480 generally. And you might think, well, who cares, the games are super low res anyway. But what this high resolution enables the Pocket to do is to use display filters to draw in the games as if they were actually appearing on that original, low resolution screen.

I'm probably not explaining it too well, so here's an example:




If you look at that image full res and zoom in, you can see how realistic the effect can be. And personally I really like that, and much prefer it to a 'raw pixels' look of a typical emulator, because I think you're getting closer to the original intent of the artists (the green DMG look isn't the only filter btw - there are ones for other Gameboy models and GBA, too, and there'll be ones coming for the other platforms it supports).

I've been trying similar stuff recently on my computer, using the 3000x2000 screen on my laptop with screen filters to draw in SNES and MD games as they would have appeared on a CRT. The emulator actually uses the high resolution of the screen to draw in each of the red, green and blue phosphors, to build the picture as a CRT would do. The idea of the Pocket screen filters is similar.

A bit of a long post, but I hope that explains why I think the Pocket is cool. Being able to use original carts is just a bonus, for me, really. The FPGA and the screen are the important parts, and there aren't any other handhelds on the market that offer these

[speedlolita]

1600x900 would be 16:9.

1600x1440 for a 10x GB resolution scale.

[wakka]

As you can see, I'm an expert on the Analogue Pocket

->Open Spoiler<-

Thank you for the correction! That makes a lot more sense!

[CMcK]

I already own original GG and GBA carts I can use with the Pocket but a flash cart or FPGA core will be very convenient for taking a load of hands with me when traveling.
As wakka pointed out it’s all about the screen on the Pocket. I have a modded GG already but it’s compromised by the resolution not being a good fit for the games. I’ve toyed with buying a modded GBA with a modern screen but even that won’t get close to this. After getting a MiSTer the potential of the FPGA in the Pocket has me intrigued. It will likely end up the premier portable multi platform system with superior recreation compared to software emulation.

Had a text from FedEx this morning confirming shipping. Should be here by Wednesday!

[dataDave]

I promise this isn't a dig, but I'm curious why a few of you have bought the Analog Pocket, which is able to play legit carts, but you're using it like any other handheld emulator crammed with illegal ROMs?

What's made you go down this more expensive route for handheld emulation?

Did you plan to be good, but once the hacking started it was too good to resist?
Did you always plan to go the hacks/flashcart route and this hardware looks the best on the market?

Just curious!

I'd normally be all over something like this whether or not I own the best carts (on this occasion I actually still do) but I personally haven't opted for one because I don't really care so much about faithfully emulating the handful of GB games I still deem enjoyable. My modded GBA and stock NGPC cover everything else anyway. I'll pick up a clean GBC if I ever find a mint atomic purple one out in the wild somewhere, maybe.

[wakka]

Realised that the Pocket website has a much better showcase of the stuff I was babbling on about with screen filters:

DMG



GBC



GBA

[CMcK]

And I’m sure the Pocket will have a better battery life than my GG!

[Colin]

Those display mode images are the fits thing I've seen for this that makes me understand what the fuss is all about, they look awesome.

[gware]

Mine has finally shipped, order 91***

[Brad]

Emulation (which is all you can realistically do in software) is the act of making a system behave like the system it is emulating. Like a tribute act. Sometimes the tribute act is so good that it’s indistinguishable from the original artist, but in the back of your mind you know that you just saw Runs & Goses.

Simulation (what fpgas do) is the act of replicating the chips of the original hardware. I don’t have an analogy.

Fpgas are often how modern systems are designed in fact; you make the chip you actually want in an fpga first, test it and when you’ve ironed out all the bugs then you make loads of actual real chips based on the fpga (at scale real chips are cheaper than fpgas). Retro systems are just doing this back to front!