Topic: I want Analogue to do Game Boy/GBA next.

With the incredible level of quality this company has shown producing their clones of Mega Drive/Genesis, NES and SNES, I really want this talented company to produce a clone Game Boy with the modern touch. While I like those systems a good bit, what I primarily grew up playing the portable systems. I've got a DS Lite and a modded GBA but those are still kinda ad-hoc solutions. I'd like to see Analogue give us a clone GBA with a modern quality (and brightness) screen, rechargeable battery, Bluetooth headphone support, and a similar set of video and audio options they provided on their other clone systems. Perhaps even HDMI out and support for Bluetooth wireless controllers.

I have felt for a while now that there is an abundance of clone home consoles but next to no support for clone handhelds, and the point has been made to me that the screens are the main reason - which is fair - but mobile devices are in abundance these days, I have to imagine someone, somewhere, either could make, or has a good viable screen they could use for such a device. I mean they sell 40 dollar smartphones now with 720p screens...

Do you guys think there is much chance they might sometime do something like this? Am I the only one crazy enough to think he'd happily drop 200 bucks on something like this?

$200 on clones of consoles which originally cost that price sounds less crazy than on portables that originally cost about $90.
Would they go to the effort of including multiplayer/GC-link support?

Supposedly the original Game Boy had a rather finicky means of link support (which, aside from Nintendo's usual barebones support for VC consoles might have been why only Pokemon cared to go the extra effort of supporting it. Reading technical details on the link port it sounded far less straight-forward to emulate than the Game Gear link port which I read Sega supported on their GG VC games, though I could never check it), and then on GBA you have the single- and multi- cartridge link modes.

@KingMike When you account for inflation in today's dollars the Game Boy would have been around 170 dollars according to IGN. But that aside, Analogue's other systems are around that price range too, and I am hoping for one device that supports both GBA and Game Boy games.

I imagine Analogue could get link cable support - after all the recent Mega SG also supports the original Sega CD add on, and that uses a proprietary connection as well. Analogue seems to design their clones for pure quality, they are premium products, not cheap Chinese piracy and emulation boxes but true clone machines that mimic the hardware and improve it for modern standards. So they aren't cheap, but you are getting a premium product geared toward serious fans.

And if they did what I hope, and added support for Bluetooth controllers and headphones, it is possible Bluetooth could also be a viable alternative for multiplayer support - they could conceivably set it up so that the system "sees" the signal as it would an original link cable. Though I am no engineer or programmer and there may be things I don't know about that prevent that, but looking at the custom hardware fans have made in other products, it seems entirely feasible.

Part of the appeal of the Analogue consoles is playing 8 and 16-bit games in 1080p on your big shiny TV with crisp sound.

I don't think there is a market for an enhanced Gameboy when those games don't benefit from higher resolutions. Plus, Gameboy and GBA's are tanks and there are tens and tens of millions of them floating around which can be bought for $15-20.

@KennyBania I don't think you've tried playing one recently. I think it is totally laughable to suggest that there is no market for a Game Boy with a screen that isn't totally trash. I grew up with Game Boy Color and GBA and loved them as a kid, it was the only way to play those games. But going back and playing them on dim or not even back-lit screens today is painful! A couple years ago I played through Pokemon Blue, my original copy, on my original Game Boy color... The nostalgia was strong, but everything else about the experience... massively inconvenient.

They would benefit immensely from high resolution and brightness. Analogue has shown they can give all the options you could want in one of their systems. I know I am not alone in wanting to play those games on a modern, crisp, bright handheld screen. The only reason I don't have all these games on an emulator on my phone - aside from the dubiously legal nature of that method - is the lack of good, physical buttons. I have done that and it looks beautiful! But it would be so much better to be able to do that on a real machine, rather than a PC or phone emulator, and with the real cartridges.

In a way one could say I am spoiled by modern quality. But you cannot close Pandora's box. Old school Game Boy and GBA screens were okay at the time because that was really all there was. Today however we know that it could be so much better.

@subpopz I have that, and went so far as to get a modded original GBA with the screen, and while it is dramatically better than any screen before it, it is still not what I would like, still dimmer than my phone or tablet and dimmer than the DS lite even. The SP 101 would have blown my mind had I known of its existence when it was actually new.

But what I basically want now is basically a Samsung Galaxy or iPhone quality screen inside a Game Boy Advance frame, bonus would be having HDMI out and Bluetooth support like I described above.

While I love my GBA SP 101, I think there is definitely a market for an improved GBA or GB model. A better, backlit screen would go a long way by itself. Heck, I'd kill for a Game Gear clone of some kind simply for the same reasons. Better screen, backlight, no ghosting or blurring, etc. I haven't actually invested in a clone console yet, but a clone GBA would have the potential to be my first one. (The AVS is currently the one I have my eye on the most.)

@Onion A revised Game Gear would also be able to fix the battery issue that system always had. That thing drank batteries like most alcoholics drink cheap whiskey!

I feel like there was already a previous topic on this but you would definitely want to have options to recreate the "crappy" screens for games that were specifically designed towards them.
The original Game Boy and Game Gear low-refresh LCDs, the dark GBC/GBA screen (as games targeted to them might have had excessively bright colors to compensate: they expected you to see colors darker)

Though I'm guessing they didn't put a NTSC filter option on the NES. I've heard the PAL NES didn't suffer as much color distortion, but the color on an actual NES (again, NTSC at the least) is quite debatable and I'm not sure how well it is studied how the actual console actually generates its colors but I believe it is susceptible to distortion by the TV tuner in CRTs. That is, it's not a simple RGB as most other consoles and a real console can even vary significantly between TVs.
Like you can play Mario on some TVs and get a blue sky and lavender on others. Sure, with Mario we can guess which is more correct but some other games might not be so easy what was intended.
My favorite example is a Famicom game called Dragon Scroll.
Here is some comparisons I took long ago between the game running on a real US front-loader (using a pin convertor and actual Famicom cartridge) run through an AV capture device (Dazzle) and an emulator. I had some photos I took of the game output to an old CRT I no longer have but I can't find them at the moment. I will say that the color on them was closer to the emulator screenshots.
Also visible is some garbage because the capture device captured the full 240 visible scanlines, whereas NTSC NES games were often programed to assume the outer 16 scanlines would never be seen (and some games like this didn't bother to spend precious Vblank cycles to update them when scrolling).

@KingMike These are all issues I suspect Analogue could handle after seeing just how overwhelmingly well they handled their other products.