An Age Undreamed Of

A few weeks ago I got some good financial news at work on Friday, was feeling a little giddy and buzzed from White Russians at a local bar on a frozen Saturday morning around sunrise, and pulled the trigger and ordered a device called an Analogue Pocket. It is a modern device that plays Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges and boy was it expensive.

Weighing against the collection of aging Game Boy hardware my wife and I’ve accumulated was the perfectly playable collection of timeless software we own for those devices, so I’ve been on the fence about the Analogue Pocket for awhile. Which was fine, as it was scarce at first and it’s always good to wait for the reviews to hit.

The consensus was positive that it was a great design and the games looked amazing. Here is the cutting edge tech behind it:

Pocket is built with one Altera Cyclone V FPGA and one Cyclone 10. This implementation is to support 3rd party FPGA development accessing the Cyclone V.  

I’m so old I have no idea what that is. Field Programmable Gate Array? I’m confused because one “Cyclone” is a V and another is a 10. Either use Roman numerals or don’t.  All I understand is that it’s not an emulator running on a Raspberry Pi, its a “core” that thinks it’s a Game Boy or something.

It arrived about a week later, and I confess I tracked it all the way from California on a FedEx truck. I fired it up right out of the box and quickly realized that I did not do my research. It did not come with a micro SD memory card, which is needed to create save anywhere states, so I could not do that right away. I also need to somehow get the latest firmware update onto an SD card and bring it over, but that can wait as the unit is ok without the update to do what I wanted - play old games better.

I've began by testing it with two games: Wizards & Warriors X Fortress of Fear for the Game Boy, and Advance Wars for the Game Boy Advance. My eyes melted as the screen lit up and the title screen appeared for Wizards and Warriors X, a game I love but found to be much harder than its NES counterparts. 

One of the Analogue Pocket's features is the selection of screens one can select, reflecting the Game Boy’s history of hardware. Right out of the box, it was set to the standard, original Game Boy:

Even though it’s green it’s crisp and clean. But the Analogue GB option is even better:

Other options include Original GBP (Game Boy Pocket), Original GBP Light, and Pinball Neon Matrix, which makes everything red. Similar modes exist and show up when one inserts a Game Boy Color or Game Boy Advance cartridge.

The aforementioned Wizards & Warriors X Fortress of Fear is a very tough Game Boy game that I had never gotten that far in. That was not just a difficult gameplay thing holding me back, but also the technical limitations of the hardware that made side-scrolling blur a lot. That issue is completely gone with the Analogue Pocket.

In fact, I made it farther in my first session with the game than I ever had before. Once I had the micro SD card inserted, I was able to create a save state, allowing me to save anywhere. One simply presses the “Analogue” button and holds up on the d-pad to create it instantly without pausing, and Analogue-down to load it. So far I’ve made it to level 3.0, but hold no illusions that I’ll ever actually beat it.

I mainly got the Pocket to play the Game Boy Advance classic Advance Wars, where I was able to use the cartridge’s built-in saves in conjunction with the save state feature to ease my playthrough. I’ll do a full write-up on that once I (hopefully) beat it.

There was a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s where I wondered if I was the only one who not only cared about game preservation but also saw the value of playing old games. That concern was resolved when I discovered the classic Digital Press newsletter, and by the end of the decade, the internet.

Decades later, the nineties kids have grown up and become become collectors themselves, and hobbyists have gotten more advanced than any generation that has come before.

The rewards of this are homebrew games and controllers for retro systems, modders taking old hardware and installing better screens and buttons, and the Analogue Pocket, which I’ve been calling the Rolls Royce of Game Boy hardware. 

I never conceived in my many hours of wondering how I would continue to play these games when the hardware or screens no longer worked that such a thing as the Analogue Pocket would become available.

For video gamers, this is truly an age undreamed of.