Analogue Pocket (FPGA GB/GBC/GBA/NGP/LYNX)

[orange808]

Of course it sold out. Resellers saw dollar signs when they heard Analogue has another limited edition machine.

I'm wondering how many units were purchased specifically for resale--and how patient the resellers can be. For maximum return, a reseller will want to sit on CIB units for a couple years.

Should be fun to see just how much money trust fund millennials have to spend on these.

[ldeveraux]

...it was mentioned that it would be a limited release/limited amount of units...

I think we can safely assume this will prove false.

[Guspaz]

I think that it's half-and-half. They probably *are* going to be doing multiple production runs, and this probably *was* legitimately the size of their first production run. However, I think they intentionally did not do an open pre-order system (whereby when the number of pre-orders exceeds the size of the first production run, the estimated delivery date of orders made after that shifts back a few months) in order to create artificial scarcity.

I don't think they intentionally limited the size of the first production run to increase scarcity, because if that was their goal, they would have picked a number that would have lasted a few hours, rather than a few minutes. That would have significantly increased their revenue by many times over while still preserving the "Oh shoot, they were limited and I missed it." factor.

So either they unintentionally severely underestimated the demand, or more likely, were unable to secure any more factory time than that. The problem was that they intentionally chose not to do anything to mitigate that in terms of pre-selling future production runs at the same time.

[fernan1234]

Buying these products so far in advance of release sucks. Ideally they'll have actual stock at some point. Otherwise, if it does end up receiving positive reviews and looks worthwhile, I'd probably be willing to pay around a $50 premium to scalpers, though not much more than that.

[Lawfer]

Isn't the limited amount of units due to the fact that the screen used in these units were only available in limited number to begin with? Because these screens are leftover from some other device used in Valve's product.

[AZA]

Isn't the limited amount of units due to the fact that the screen used in these units were only available in limited number to begin with? Because these screens are leftover from some other device used in Valve's product.

oh gee i certainly hope not. that would suck.

i was hoping this thing would have PC Engine support

[Guspaz]

They do appear to be the same screens as is used in the Valve Index, except:

1) Valve is still making the Index, so they would still have an ongoing demand for more screens
2) Analogue's manufacturing volume is not that different from the Valve Index, since that thing is niche ultra-premium HMD that costs 2.5x as much as competing products.

For comparison, Valve sold 149k units in 6 months (two thirds of those due to a surge when Half-Life Alyx came out), while Analogue sold somewhere between 12k and 30k units in 8 minutes until they shut off pre-orders.

Analogue should be able to commit to sufficient quantities of the displays to get their own manufacturing runs, because they'll probably be making as many of the things as Valve is making Indexes. Of courses, there are two screens per Index, but you get the point.

[Fudoh]

for now it's an issue with the manufacturing capacities. The support already said they'll have more runs and will try to satisfy full demand. Anything else would be stupid. It's a magnificent product with a much wider appeal than any FGPA home console would ever have.

[strygo]

It's crazy that this thread is now over 2 years old. So far the reviews I've seen have been glowing across the board. I had missed out on the initial pre-order but placed an order yesterday morning. I'm surprised that pre-orders are still open - I'm hoping this means I got into the next batch.

Has anyone gotten their pre-order yet? Any initial thoughts beyond what reviewers shared?

[eightbitminiboss]

It's crazy that this thread is now over 2 years old. So far the reviews I've seen have been glowing across the board. I had missed out on the initial pre-order but placed an order yesterday morning. I'm surprised that pre-orders are still open - I'm hoping this means I got into the next batch.

Has anyone gotten their pre-order yet? Any initial thoughts beyond what reviewers shared?

People who pre-ordered last year should be getting their units by now. I saw a few people in one of my Discord servers get theirs.

As to why preorders are still open is that Analogue is going to do rolling batches, they'll just keep taking orders and they'll slot you into batches. If you were fast enough, you should be in the first block which is Q1 2022, the next is Q4 and the current last block they have scheduled is just marked as 2023.

[ZellSF]

It's crazy that this thread is now over 2 years old. So far the reviews I've seen have been glowing across the board.

Obvious reminder: don't trust tech youtubers at all, especially don't trust the ones who get the product for free (which will always be a golden sample).

One concerning thing Digital Foundry (the only review I have watched, which is weird because I don't like Digital Foundry) mentioned was that dpad diagonals were not optimal.

Also some drama: https://endrift.com/2021/12/13/analogue ... ate-story/

And in the interest of this post not being overly critical: it still looks to be a great product for the price. I'm just not getting it, because if I ever need handheld gaming I still have a backlog of Vita games.

Edit: The lack of support for bluetooth audio and USB-C sound devices is pretty bad. Yeah there are headphone jack adapters, but then you need to charge those too. I dislike this about the MiSTer too, but at least that's not designed to be portable.

If you care about piracy or non game boy systems (Which will add another 90$ to that price tag if you want to use real carts) that much, an RG350p is 80$ and will emulate all these systems with a 240p display (Or a 480p display with the pricier model for more scaling options)with 1:1 pixel mapping options and 99% of people won't be able to see any difference vs an FPGA emulated system.

Replying to old posts, but I missed this bit of BONKERS ignorance. No people will see the difference between those shit-tier resolutions and a high DPI screen.

Black bars / scrolling shimmering / awful scaling / wrong aspect ratio. You'll have at least one of those, probably two, depending on system.

I hate how all those retro gaming systems (and new systems actually, looking at you Valve Deck), which otherwise might be interesting, source the worst shit-tier displays because people have been conned into thinking it's a good thing*.

* It might be for battery life. Not for quality though.

[fernan1234]

That story from the mGBA dev reminded me that this won't be using the original "BIOS". It will kind of bug me not to see the original logo splash screens.

As to the device itself, I have two concerns that hopefully will be addressed in updates soon.

1) No correct color space for GBC and GBA. Currently there's only a desaturation slider, rather than actual color correction to which we are now used to from MiSTer, GBA Consolizer, GBI, Retroarch shaders, etc. The Pocket's LCD modes, which IMO are the main value-adding feature, are clearly only affecting the colors via desaturation plus the RGB subpixel emulation, but not correcting the color primaries to match or approximate the original AGS-001 non-sRGB color space.

This should be a separate setting, with color profiles to match original AGS-001, DS Phat, PSP, etc. like we have on other solutions, even for those who decide not to use the LCD modes but would like to see correct colors. They can keep the desaturation setting around, for people who feel the need to wash out their picture, though really no one should be doing that if they can get better colors the right way.

2) Scaling artifacts in GBA LCD mode due to non-integer (and non-polyphase) scaling. The MLiG review pointed this out as noticeable in certain conditions.

[ldeveraux]

I'm surprised that pre-orders are still open

Given their track record of saying they were never going to build more units, only to have many more rounds of units follow, maybe people finally realized these weren't as "limited" as they were told? If you even want one that is, you can always get one in the 9th round of releases.

[parodius]

Given their track record of saying they were never going to build more units, only to have many more rounds of units follow, maybe people finally realized these weren't as "limited" as they were told? If you even want one that is, you can always get one in the 9th round of releases.

I didn’t follow up closely, but wasn’t this the case only for the Nt Noir? For the other ones (Super Nt onwards) they have actually clarified that they intend to continue producing them all.

[evil_ash_xero]

Could anyone give me an idea of how much bigger the image would be for a GBA game, rather than playing on a DS Lite? I'd love a bigger image for that system.

[Guspaz]

2) Scaling artifacts in GBA LCD mode due to non-integer (and non-polyphase) scaling. The MLiG review pointed this out as noticeable in certain conditions.

It should be noted that this is only relevant for the "LCD simulation" modes for the GBA, it's not a problem in the "Analogue" mode, which is essentially (or has the same appearance as) a "sharp bilinear" scale. With a ~6.7x scale at 615 DPI, nobody will be able to tell that it's not an integer scale. The problem is that the "LCD simulation" mode is effectively a higher resolution source image (so, a much lower ratio scale), where you can start running into visible artifacting.

As for those cheap handhelds with the 240p, they always look terrible. They're the wrong resolution for every platform they support. SNES and NES were 256x224, Genesis was 320x224, GBA was 240x160, GB/GG were 160x144 (at different pixel aspect ratios to boot), and those are all scaling factors between 1 and 2. Super low scaling ratios and super lower resolutions, there's no way to make that anything but a blurry mess.

[Guspaz]

Could anyone give me an idea of how much bigger the image would be for a GBA game, rather than playing on a DS Lite? I'd love a bigger image for that system.

The DS Lite was 256x192 pixels with a diagonal size of 79 mm. The aspect ratio was 4:3 so the width was 51.5mm. With 1:1 scaling, at 240 pixels wide, the GBA screen image would be 48.3 mm wide.

The Analogue Pocket's screen is 59.4 mm wide.

[evil_ash_xero]

Could anyone give me an idea of how much bigger the image would be for a GBA game, rather than playing on a DS Lite? I'd love a bigger image for that system.

The DS Lite was 256x192 pixels with a diagonal size of 79 mm. The aspect ratio was 4:3 so the width was 51.5mm. With 1:1 scaling, at 240 pixels wide, the GBA screen image would be 48.3 mm wide.

The Analogue Pocket's screen is 59.4 mm wide.

Sounds good. I'll get one, then.

[strygo]

Given their track record of saying they were never going to build more units, only to have many more rounds of units follow, maybe people finally realized these weren't as "limited" as they were told? If you even want one that is, you can always get one in the 9th round of releases.

It looks like they are now showing the units sold today are in Group C. I placed an initial order at 8:02 and a second order with some accessories at 8:15 and those order numbers were over 15,000 apart. It will be interesting to learn how many made it into Group A. But it seems like this unit will be a major hit for them.

[ldeveraux]

Given their track record of saying they were never going to build more units, only to have many more rounds of units follow, maybe people finally realized these weren't as "limited" as they were told? If you even want one that is, you can always get one in the 9th round of releases.

It looks like they are now showing the units sold today are in Group C. I placed an initial order at 8:02 and a second order with some accessories at 8:15 and those order numbers were over 15,000 apart. It will be interesting to learn how many made it into Group A. But it seems like this unit will be a major hit for them.

And this one should be, it looks like a great portable unit. But the others? At those prices? Not so sure.

[EnragedWhale]

I preordered one back in Aug 2020 and I’m expecting a dispatch notice soon. Whilst not 100% perfect (nothing ever is) from reviews it looks to be the best way to play these games on a handheld and is reasonably priced compared to modded OG hardware.

My only hope is the updates keep coming as they’ve been terrible at this in the past. The Mega SG in particular has lingering issues years old at this point.

[evil_ash_xero]

Any word of DAC compatibility, in the future?

[Gunstar]

Any word of DAC compatibility, in the future?

DF Retro mentioned DAC support would be coming in a firmware update

2) Scaling artifacts in GBA LCD mode due to non-integer (and non-polyphase) scaling. The MLiG review pointed this out as noticeable in certain conditions.

It should be noted that this is only relevant for the "LCD simulation" modes for the GBA, it's not a problem in the "Analogue" mode, which is essentially (or has the same appearance as) a "sharp bilinear" scale. With a ~6.7x scale at 615 DPI, nobody will be able to tell that it's not an integer scale. The problem is that the "LCD simulation" mode is effectively a higher resolution source image (so, a much lower ratio scale), where you can start running into visible artifacting.

As for those cheap handhelds with the 240p, they always look terrible. They're the wrong resolution for every platform they support. SNES and NES were 256x224, Genesis was 320x224, GBA was 240x160, GB/GG were 160x144 (at different pixel aspect ratios to boot), and those are all scaling factors between 1 and 2. Super low scaling ratios and super lower resolutions, there's no way to make that anything but a blurry mess.

Could the artifacts be avoided with pillar boxing or/and using a different LCD overlay, perhaps a simple grid?

[ZellSF]

The simplest grid would be 540x320, if you bilinear scale that to 1600x1440 you probably won't see any scaling artifacts.

It won't be pretty though. I'm guessing Analogue chose their scaling options pretty deliberately, and the alternatives aren't better. Maybe they'll eventually leave control up to users how they want to balance LCD simulation quality with scaling quality.

[Johnpv]

I got mine yesterday, haven't had a ton of time to run it through its paces but so far I'm really happy with it. It has a really nice weight and feel to it, and the screen is absolutely beautiful.

I'm surprised that pre-orders are still open

Given their track record of saying they were never going to build more units, only to have many more rounds of units follow, maybe people finally realized these weren't as "limited" as they were told? If you even want one that is, you can always get one in the 9th round of releases.

They never said they were never going to make more pockets. In fact they've always said there would be more. Only the NT Minis and NT Mini Noirs were ever said to be limited products.

[Guspaz]

Analogue posted on twitter today that nearly all of the pre-orders from the 14th made it into group A (Q1 2022) or B (Q4 2022), but they won't be sending out the e-mails letting people know which until Monday.

[NewSchoolBoxer]

I really like ZellSF's post, especially for bringing the GBA mess and the bad vibes of kevtris hoarding console knowledge to my attention. This matters significantly with NGPC emulation where to this day the 2 player link mode isn't fully understood and most games can't be linked. Obviously the logic must be known upon the firmware update that would allow linking with real NGPC. That is a huge selling point over free NGPC software emulators - so I imagine linking tech spec will never be released.

I watched 3 or 4 of the Pocket YouTube reviews and all were glowing but what none of them mentioned in their reviews was the price increase. That sure seems smart to announce a $20 increase on December 10th with the review blackout ending on December 13th. Too late to re-record when you already started video editing. As if the chip shortage wasn't a thing this entire year and they just suddenly noticed their costs would go up on the next print run.

The reviewers also fail to mention the ridiculous $26 shipping cost in the US. Georgia sales tax puts that to $265.06.



Total pushes to $372.80 with the Dock. At that price point, Could get a decent laptop, a MiSTer setup (with more powerful FPGA) or two and a half RG350M (with HDMI video out). How is there sales tax in a state with no physical presence anyway? No international shipping option, but I guess you'd be SOL paying an import tariff on top of $89.99 USD shipping that Voultar tweeted the DAC cost to send to Australia.

Fulfillment Group C: 2023: How is making people pay OVER A YEAR in advance a thing? Arcade1Up charges you when you pre-order a $699 cabinet and Limited Run Games and Strictly Limited times to ship can be 6+ months. I guess that's the industry standard. Never mind then.

I would have wanted the GBA aspect ratio when I haven't played a GB or GBC game on their original console since GBA came out. Must be unpopular opinion. I'd think the wider aspect ratio would help with GG pseudo vertical scanlines. Actually, buying a GBA SP for less than half the Pocket's price that runs GB, GBC and GBA games on real hardware sounds compelling to me.

[bobrocks95]

The reviewers also fail to mention the ridiculous $26 shipping cost in the US. Georgia sales tax puts that to $265.06.

Total pushes to $372.80 with the Dock. At that price point, Could get a decent laptop, a MiSTer setup (with more powerful FPGA) or two and a half RG350M (with HDMI video out). How is there sales tax in a state with no physical presence anyway? No international shipping option, but I guess you'd be SOL paying an import tariff on top of $89.99 USD shipping that Voultar tweeted the DAC cost to send to Australia.

$30 shipping was enough to turn me off on a Super NT impulse buy. Unless they're using 2-day shipping (pretty sure they're not) I thought at the time that they just wanted to hit that $199 on everything and then absorb some costs by charging more than double what they should be on shipping. At the time that was enough to make me iffy on them.

[ldeveraux]

They never said they were never going to make more pockets. In fact they've always said there would be more. Only the NT Minis and NT Mini Noirs were ever said to be limited products.

I'm just gving another reason why people hate Analogue and wouldn't buy this product. Myself very much included.

[EnragedWhale]

No international shipping option, but I guess you'd be SOL paying an import tariff on top of $89.99 USD shipping that Voultar tweeted the DAC cost to send to Australia.

For balance they charged me $35 shipping to the uk via a priority service. Shipped Fri and I’m expecting it tomorrow. Can see why US folks are upset at what they get charged though.