This $199 handheld will be the most decadent way to play Game Boy games

“Since the beginning, day one, we’ve always wanted to do a portable, handheld system,” Analogue founder Christopher Taber tells me over the phone.

Analogue makes exceedingly high-quality hardware to play the original cartridges from classic video game consoles, and the company is about to announce its first portable, the Analogue Pocket. And Taber is understandably enthusiastic about discussing what might be his dream project.

But why did it take so long for Analogue to tackle something everyone involved has wanted to do for years?

Classic games, modern resolutions

The Analogue Pocket plays Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges out of the box, and fans will be able to buy adapters to allow it to also play Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color, and Atari Lynx cartridges, along with those of some other, unannounced classic portables.

What it won’t do is play ROMs; the cartridges themselves are necessary to play games on the system. [Ed. note: It’s worth noting that previous FPGA-based Analogue systems — like the NT mini, the Super NT and the Mega SG — support ROMs via jailbroken firmware.]

It also comes with a built-in synthesizer called Nanoloop — which some enthusiasts may already be familiar with — so players can start making their own chiptune music immediately.

It’s the screen that may be the real story of the Analogue Pocket, though. Taber becomes positively breathless when describing it to me. But then again, who doesn’t get excited about playing Game Boy games on a 1600x1440 display?

“One of the biggest hurdles for making the portable that we have always wanted to make was the display,” he explains. Most inexpensive portables coming from China use cheap widescreen displays that rely on black bars to force the original aspect ratio of the hardware, and the screens are chosen to be adequate but not exceptional. That’s why it took Analogue so long to finally release its own portable.

“We essentially were waiting for the right display,” Taber says, “working with suppliers and trying to get something that we really wanted, and we were finally able to do that.”

The stats speak for themselves.

“It is an extraordinarily special display, with all things considered, for its respective application,” Taber says. “It’s 10 times the resolution of the original Game Boy. It’s 3.5 inches, it’s 615 ppi. It’s an LTPS LCD, which is very, very nice and is the correct aspect ratio ... I still just can’t even believe that we were able to get displays with the correct aspect ratio with this size, that has all of these features in it.”

But the hardware’s brains are just as impressive as its display, and Taber stresses that everything in the Analogue Pocket, from the hardware to the software that drives it, was built from scratch.

And while a software-based emulator is fully capable of delivering an excellent experience — see Nintendo’s Classic Edition lineup, with software-based features like save states and instant rewind — Analogue’s solution is to instead emulate the hardware itself. Because rebuilding Genesis consoles by stockpiling 30-year-old Motorola 68000 CPUs and Yamaha YM2612 sound chips is unrealistic, Analogue’s consoles use a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip, which can, in simple terms, simulate the original hardware inside a Sega Genesis. The creation of these so-called “cores” by Analogue’s own Kevin Horton is the company’s secret sauce.

“An FPGA is in essence a special chip that can be configured to be, well, basically any other chip,” Taber says in a description of the technology he sent me after our phone interview. “It is configured on the schematic level. Meaning it operates on the transistor level. It is configured in HDL (Hardware Description Language) similarly to the way an ASIC (Application-specific integrated circuit) is configured to be manufactured. In other words, whatever an FPGA is configured to be, it can operate identically to, in real time. This can translate into 100% accuracy. Meaning with an FPGA it’s possible to recreate original hardware functionality, perfectly.”

Analogue uses an FPGA solution in its recent hardware, which is one of the reasons the products have such a dedicated following among enthusiasts. So why doesn’t everyone handle classic games this way?

“The downsides are that FPGA’s are expensive — the FPGA in Mega Sg is a $53 USD chip — and it takes an incredible amount of time and talent to achieve this. Our engineers spent over 5,000 hours engineering Mega Sg,” Taber writes. “Fortunately we’ve got the best guy to do it.”

The upsides to this approach are huge.

“Using an FPGA can translate to total accuracy, pixel perfection, and 100% lag free,” Taber writes. “Literally, our hardware produces zero lag.”

Analogue also included a second FPGA in the Analogue Pocket just for developers “to develop and port their own cores,” which means that the usefulness of the hardware may be extended if it catches on in the development community. Taber hints about unannounced features of the hardware at multiple points in our conversation.

Everything we know about the hardware already, however, points to a pretty exciting product, and that’s before we get to one major detail: The Analogue Pocket can also function like a Nintendo Switch.

The dock and pricing

Analogue is creating a dock for the Pocket that will allow you to output the signal to your television or computer monitor to play your classic portable games at home, complete with support for wireless Bluetooth controllers from 8BitDo or wired USB controllers. The Analogue Dock will be a separate accessory, although Taber says you won’t have to break the bank to get one.

“It will be a price people will be happy with,” he tells me. “It’s not going to be a very expensive accessory.”

And that goes for most of the product line, in fact; it’s not an inexpensive piece of hardware, but the price seems more than fair considering the feature set. The Pocket will be released in 2020 for $199.99, and Taber promises the cartridge adapters won’t break the bank.

“I can’t say the price specifically for each of these just yet but, for example, the cartridge adapters that we released for Mega SG, our Sega Genesis remake, were between $10 and $15 each,” he says. “So our target would be somewhere in that category.” He also points out that buying a Nanoloop cartridge by itself would be €49 (about $54), and the program is included with the Pocket.

It’s an impressive product, and Taber dismisses my question when I ask what he would have liked to have added if he could wave the magic wand to fix a technological issue with its design.

“Pocket is literally exactly what we want it to be,” he says, drawing out each word for emphasis. “There is nothing about it that I wished was different. We wouldn’t make it if it had compromises, and didn’t meet what we want to be. To me, for what we’re trying to achieve, Pocket is perfect.”