Multiple approaches exist to retro x (gaming | computing). As often, there is no one-size-fits-all. You find the real stuff at one end of this spectrum; you use a software emulator at the other. Using the actual hardware is – to me – the best option. But vintage electronics degrade inevitably over time and are not getting cheaper.

On the other hand, emulation become ubiquitous, and anything modern can run most emulators. Although, as I announced upfront, I prefer the original hardware, emulation has a lot of advantages. The cost, obviously, but also the convenience. For example, playing with an Apple II emulator on your laptop is way more manageable and spontaneous than firing up a real Apple II computer. But there is an alternate way that may please the purists: hardware emulation. Today, I’ll share about such a system. The Analog Pocket was announced as the best Game Boy hardware emulator when it launched.

I would say it is the best Game Boy hardware available today. That, of course, if you can find one. Indeed, whatever I ordered on Analogue’s website – the Pocket itself or its accessories – cost me a kidney and took almost one year to be delivered. The good news is that it feels like Xmas once the goods arrive and you forget about it. Unfortunately, this long-term investment that customers must make has become a familiar pattern in the industry. My most extended wait to date – and it is still going – is four years!

The Analogue Pocket can play any Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges out of the box. That’s over 2500 games! The Pocket can also play games for Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket, and Atari Lynx with the proper adapters. And there is more, as we will see later on.

But wait, you can do the same with a simple RetroPi and a GPi Case, as I showed here. True. However, the Pocket has way better hardware and uses an FPGA (Intel/Altera Cyclone V 49K logic elements) to reproduce the other console’s hardware. This allows for a more accurate reproduction than a software implementation and, as mentioned earlier, allows for reusing the target system’s actual ROM cartridges. With software emulation, first, you depend upon a non-deterministic operating system, and you must dump or find ROM images on the Web to feed your software. The Pocket has a second FPGA (Intel/Altera Cyclone 10 15K logic elements) to run the Analog OS and manage the system, dedicating the Cyclone V to run the cores.

At $200, the pop – again, if you can find one – an Analogue Pocket costs $120 more than a GPi Case 2W. The extra $120 brings you first an incredible 3.5″ LCD that offers a resolution of 1600 × 1440 pixels – 10x the resolution of an original Game Boy – and a density of 615ppi. It is the best screen I’ve seen on any pocket console. Please note that the pictures I took to illustrate this post don’t do justice to the screen.

Depending on your game, you can cycle the LCD between different modes by pressing two buttons. For example, you can switch between GB, CGB, and GBA. Sometimes, you can access completely new displays (CRT Trinitron, Pinball Neo Matrix, etc.)

The two FPGAs mentioned earlier are at the heart of the Pocket, and a 4300mAh rechargeable lithium-ion battery provides 6–10 hours of gameplay and 10+ hours of sleep. One super cool feature of the Pocket is the ability to suspend any game by pressing the power button shortly and resuming it whenever you power the console up again.

Your Pocket also has a solid audio sub-system (Stereo speakers, 3.5mm headphone output). And if you are a chiptune fan, the Pocket can be used out of the box as a MIDI sequencer (Nanoloop). Bit Shifter, Chipzel, Trash80, and co., beware, the competition is coming! To be complete, although I don’t own them, several options are proposed for the Pocket by Analogue: a docking station to play on your TV, Bluetooth, multiplayer gaming, MIDI cable, Pocket Link cable, Pocket Game Gear cartridge adapter, etc. As always, they are likely out of stock.

What else? You can do two more things with your Pocket if you are a developer. First, you can write your Game Boy game using the GB Studio. This game development framework doesn’t require writing any line of C or assembler. Instead, you use the graphical user interface to drag and drop your game’s objects, writing scripts executed on events you define. The studio also provides for music and graphics creation. Once you have finished testing your game on your desktop computer, you can generate a ROM image you can load on the Pocket.

Second, you can create a new core to be run by the Cyclone V. Analogue, positioning the FPGA as the ultimate preservation solution for gaming hardware is betting on openFPGA. Indeed, you can implement your preferred gaming hardware as an FPGA core – assuming it fits your gate budget (49K). Of course, if your Verilog is rusty, you can always access all the cores the community has developed. You can find a catalog here. Usually, I would disassemble my Pocket to show you its guts. But today, I will skip this step since you can find details of such surgery all over the Web, particularly on the ifixit website here.

A final word. We recently moved, so I lost the green desk I used to install my blog’s visual identity over the years. Now, I need to find a new graphic distinctiveness, so please bear with me as I search for it. Similarly, I must find my marks to take better pictures. True, my Pocket’s black piano finish doesn’t help – I should have bought the white version 😊 – but I know my photos suck. The good news is that I can only progress from here! Have a fantastic WE!

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