Comments 642

Re: Who Needs A Game Boy Classic Edition When You've Got The Analogue Pocket?

SepticLemon

@sdelfin An ASIC is practically a system on a chip that's pre-configured. But a FPGA is programmable, meaning you get put an details of how a system works onto it, then change it on the fly. Granted there's a loading time for that, but the beauty of this piece of kit is that there's two of them. One designed for the GameBoy hardware, and another for either the Lynx, NeoGeo Pocket, GameGear and possibly any other 8 and 16 bit system after a custom firmware update.

Re: Who Needs A Game Boy Classic Edition When You've Got The Analogue Pocket?

SepticLemon

@InAnotherCastle If it works with the GameBoy, it'll work with this. Granted the GameGenie is pretty big, and it'll hulk over this piece of kit! lmao!

Plus, from what I remember, GameBoy Color game act very weird when you use a GameGenie, so I don't think it'll be worth it. But the idea is that as this uses FPGA rather than emulation, whatever the GameBoy does, this works exactly like it too.

Re: Who Needs A Game Boy Classic Edition When You've Got The Analogue Pocket?

SepticLemon

@brunojenso Not to mention the screen on this thing is nearly twice the pixel density of the iPhone 11. A little OOT for a system to run Portable games, but the reason behind it is that it can run both GameBoy (Color) and GameBoy Advance games on the same screen without having to stretch the screen and cause Nearest-neighbor interpolation, which makes the game look blurry than the real hardware. For GameBoy games, it'll use 10*10 pixels to make one pixel in a game, whilst GBA games will have 6*6 pixels per in-game pixel so that it looks razor sharp, that's calle Integer scaling. I don't know the resolution of the other systems, but by having that huge resolution display, the other formats will look sharp too by using integer scaling rather than NN-interpolation. @KingMike @N64-ROX

Re: Who Needs A Game Boy Classic Edition When You've Got The Analogue Pocket?

SepticLemon

@brunojenso An FPGA, a field-programmable gate array, is a means to turn emulation software into an actual hardware piece of kit, and act as a system on a chip, like what the XBoxOne X uses.

The Super NT, and the Mega SG, the SNES and MegaDrive consoles that Analogue make as well, use FPGAs to make the system work like a SNES/MegaDrive at a hardware level rather than just using emulators, which can be not as accurate as the real hardware. To make things aware, a single FPGA chip are not cheap compared to other chips and ICs, sure, they're not Intel i9 prices, but from a manufacturing point of view, they're going to be the priciest thing in this system, and there's TWO of them in the Analogue Pocket.

The idea behind the Analogue Pocket's two FPGA chips is that it can run more than one system on a single piece of kit. Because this system can run GameBoy (Color/Advance), GameGear, Lynx, and NeoGeo Pocket games, through adapters. The second FPGA can be used to run those games at hardware level too rather than emulation, meaning they too can be run as accurately as possible without the needs of another single FPGA system. Simply put, the first FPGA will have the GameBoy system loaded onto it, whilst the second can be loaded with pretty much any other system to it, meaning that we could get crazy adapters for this thing that could run SNES/MegaDrive games and treat it like a modern Sega Nomad!

Re: Train Up And Compete In Hamster's Latest Arcade Archives Release Karate Champ

SepticLemon

Man! This was the second video game I ever played when I went to Caister-on-Sand when I was 5 years old!

For some reason, the Haven Holiday camp had about 3 or 4 Two Player Karate Champ machines dotted around the camp, and each time I saw one, I would beg my grandad to put a 10p piece (The older bigger coin compared to what you get today) so that I can play the game, though I doubt I was any good at it at 5 years old! lol!