Portable gaming today is associated with gaming on your smartphone. Not to take away from smartphone games but the world of portable gaming was once dominated by the likes of the Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Game Gear and later on the Neo Geo Pocket and Atari Lynx. While there are emulators out there that allow you to play yesteryear’s portable games on your smartphone, the emulation will never be perfect. If you hanker for a pixel perfect version of your favorite portable game, the Analogue Pocket is the portable game console for you.
Emulation on even the most powerful hardware today will never be absolutely perfect. Emulation is still purely software solution. The only way to get 100% emulation is to use the original hardware. This is of course impossible today but the Analogue Pocket circumvents this problem by using an FPGA ( field-programmable gate array) chip. An FPGA chip can be programmed to emulate the original hardware and it operates on the transistor level.
The FPGA chip in the Analogue Pocket is what makes it a 100% faithful emulation of the original hardware. The emulation is perfect and is 100% lag free.
The emulation hardware doesn’t just stop at the chip. The display has the correct aspect ratio as the original but updates it with a 1600 x 1440 resolution. This is 10 times the original resolution but still remains faithful as far as how the games look on screen.
One thing that needs to be clarified is that the Analogue Pocket plays and requires the original game cartridges for the Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance. It does not support game ROMs. So, time to dig through the closet and attic and blow the dust away from the cartridge contact points.
There are plans in the future to release adapters to support Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color and Atari Lynx game carts. Other possible future accessories include a dock that outputs the video signal to a TV or monitor and supports both Bluetooth and USB controllers. This turns the console into a Nintendo Switch of sorts.
Buy from Analogue.co
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