Shame it doesn’t emulate honestly. It looks incredible but I don’t have physical carts.
It does actually! NES, SNES, Genesis, Tamagotchi and more are available and can play ROMs of the SD card. I’ve helped create a number of these cores
I feel so dumb. Does it say that in their website? When I went to their webpage there was a big underlines heading that said “no emulation”
That’s a long story actually. Analogue has a (poorly implemented, in my opinion) marketing campaign advertising that their FPGA consoles don’t use normal software emulators like say SNES9x. Their devices instead emulate the consoles on a special chip called an FPGA that lets you mimic the circuits that make up the CPU and other parts. It’s still emulation, just a very different kind than what you normally get on devices like this. That’s also why it’s so hard to release new cores for the Pocket, because you have to create this mimic circuit design that often doesn’t exist elsewhere.
Analogue also doesn’t advertise the ROM playing nature, but their official cores are just a download away in a dedicated area they put aside for community contributions.
that sounds very interesting! I'm gonna go lookup FPGA emulation now
Just FYI, FPGA stands for Field Programmable Gate Array and they’re pretty much like a custom SoC which can be altered, modified or revamped in the field without the need to produce a new chip.
The biggest change, though, is the incredible screen. The Pocket features a 3.5-inch LCD display made of Gorilla Glass, with 1600 × 1440 resolution. That’s 10 times the resolution of the original gray brick Game Boy. In practice, it looks absolutely amazing. Out of the box, the Pocket supports cartridges from the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance (for other supported platforms, see the sidebar on accessories) and it’s hard to overstate just how good these games look rendered at such a high resolution, with such a bright and sharp display. The monochrome look of the original Game Boy is crisp and clear, but it especially shines when you’re playing color games where you can really see the sprites pop.
Damn, that’s really neat, I think I still got my game boy games in a closet somewhere…
If you have only been playing emulators, the screen really has no comparison to anything you've used since the original. The sub-pixel original screen emulation enabled by the resolution is truly amazing.
I am completely out of the loop and had not heard of this company’s products, including this one. Looks awesome! I’m surprised it plays GBA games in addition to GB and GBC.
I know I have my Pokemon Silver cartridge around somewhere. I’ve got plenty of GBA ones. Maybe time to look at this device.
Maybe my dock will finally ship too. Absolutely love the Pocket though.
Yay!!! I had just been thinking about this again after resigning to not getting it for a while 😆
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