AYANEO's Game Boy-Style Pocket DMG Boasts An OLED Screen

Why is this so tempting 😫
I love my Analogue Pocket but the lack of save states in most of the FPGA cores leaves some to be desired.
Physical carts have save states and that’s great but Genesis and SNES etc are lacking those, hence why something like this is tempting.

Ayaneo - what's the support for these sort of devices? They seem to release many each year and therefore is support about 2 years tops?

lucky for them, i've never heard of a gamer being picky about stick placement.

This looks like a mutated Analogue Pocket.

@ChromaticDracula I’ll take no input lag over save states any day. I can’t beat Punch Out on software emulation but can on fpga.

I would like them though more on Pocket just for sleep support.

@-wc- You don’t talk to many gamers then. PS vs Xbox stick placement discourse happens every year it feels like.

@Bonggon5 I always forget about input lag. I’ve never noticed it much in the games I play or have played over the years but now that you mention it, I don’t remember punch out being as hard as it is for me these days.
Bald Bull is usually where I notice the split second timing requirement.

I’m definitely sticking with the analogue pocket: I’m already juggling 2 handhelds between the analogue and my 3DS and I don’t really need a third!

@Bonggon5

you caught me 😅 i was being sarcastic. this is possibly the worst stick placement I've ever seen. 👍

Sweet fancy Moses that stick placement.

@ChromaticDracula input lag on emulation is very low and very hard to notice in most games. It's been overstated for years. I'm not saying the other commenter is exaggerating here, as Punch Out is a widely known example of a game where even a tiny amount of input lag makes a big difference because it's a game about recognizing patterns or tells and reacting immediately. While I've had fun with Punch Out as a kid, I'd still gladly leave it behind in favor of having save states. That convenience is too valuable to me. Lag doesn't effect anything I play in any noticeable way.

@sdelfin I definitely notice it to the point it is unbearable, especially on Android. Android has unavoidable heavy input lag due to the way the OS processes everything through the software layer.

On Switch playing directly on the built in screen with attached joycons it is good enough for me to enjoy. Not sure what kind of emulation sorcery they cooked up for their Nintendo Online retro games, but it likely has to do with the fact that their emulators have direct access to the hardware.

On everything else (PC, MacOS, Linux, Apple TV, iOS, etc) it is always noticeable to me in 8 and 16 bit games.

The one that hurts me the most is Super Mario Bros., because my muscle memory is so well tuned to the game, but many other players will be affected by other mainstream classics like Contra, Punch Out, and Tetris.

Of course there are many casual players who arent that heavy into retro games and may not have muscle memory trained or may have never been able to beat some of these games in the first place, that want to get in on the hobby and will be very happy with one of these devices.

@-wc- I am wondering if the stick can be removed and replaced with something else? Or perhaps that is just a design choice to have that box shaped indent?

@DestructoDisk I've seen lag testing done on different platforms including Android. Assuming the methodology is correct, there was little to no difference with cores tested with that particular setup. That's not to say it may not be an issue on some specific devices or versions, but I don't think there's generally any additional lag, let alone "heavy" which I am certain I'd feel because I've felt it on TVs without game modes. There is an annoying issue of sound lag sometimes however which is an Android issue. I've personally been able to go back and forth from emulation on a Linux machine to original hardware and it felt exactly the same. And that's without using "run ahead" to reduce lag further. Perhaps my upscaler box, which is old but fast at what it does, added just enough lag to feel the same, but we're still talking about a tiny amount.

I'm definitely well beyond casual and have beaten some rather difficult games via emulation. These are games where heavy lag would either make that painfully difficult or just not enjoyable enough for me to want to do that. So I think things like this can be viable for more than just casual people. I don't know what you feel and don't feel. Maybe you have heightened senses. I don't feel a difference at all. Perhaps it's that I don't have a CRT and that makes a difference. I've also seen claims and conclusions about lag that I knew to be overblown or incorrect because they didn't control the setup(different displays for example) or something like that. Based on my experience, I stand by what I said that claims about lag are overblown. FPGA boxes are beyond what a lot of people need, and that's really what started this conversation and why I joined in. I'd take save states over reduced lag because it's already not a problem for me, and I can still reduce it further if I needed to(which makes Shatterhand harder, somehow).

So what screen size and screen res does this have?

The stick should have been dropped all together. It just gets in the way of the D Pad. Boo stick.

@sdelfin yep different people are definitely sensitive to different levels of lag. You may notice the lag of a TV not set to game mode. But not be able to sense lesser lag that other people do. For me Im fine with RPGs and slower action games. But there are a lot of NES games I am sensitive to because I have played them so many times I am used to having my input trigger on a single pixel.

Some people will claim stuff like their controller has “zero lag” because they don’t personally notice it. For me I notice heavy controller lag on every Bluetooth controller. USB controllers are hit and miss for me as far as enjoyment goes, but I can feel the lag in all of them, some bearable and some too much for me to accept.

Same goes with Android emulation. I can feel the lag in all my most played NES games and it sucks the fun out of it for me personally, unless its a turn based game or less heavy on the action.

Oh dear that analogue stick location. Just, no thank you not for me. My hands are cramping up now thinking about it.

It's like their hardware engineers stopped trying and said "good enough".

@DestructoDisk I will accept that there are those more sensitive. I also think most people overestimate that. I'm not saying you are. But myths and misconceptions persist and seem to be a decade behind reality. So in my case, it's not that I can't feel added lag, but when it's only within a few frames, I can easily adapt. Once I'm calibrated to the game, I won't feel it. It's like how I stopped thinking about HD content on TV when it was new after a few minutes of watching early programs.

But this is all moot in the end. I used this as an opportunity to do some testing on lag mitigation, which I had only previously dabbled in because the games I enjoy already played fantastically. A good setup without lag reduction is already going to have about two or three frames. This is nowhere near unplayable as some of the more dramatic critics would say. But using Retroarch with "run ahead", you can literally reduce it to under a frame. It will display the action on the very next frame. On Android, I couldn't get frame advance to work, so I had to go by feel. With a wired controller, lag was very low. It felt like it was perhaps an additional frame, if at all. With my absolute worst Bluetooth controller, it felt like two to three frames, which felt identical to wired on Linux with "run ahead" turned off.

There are other good reasons to not go with Android for emulation. The fact the hotkeys were selectively working is one. I've had spotty results with wired controllers working with the libretro cores. The audio lag is a real problem, though not always. Sometimes, the convenience is nice, and it's the easiest way for me to play a vertical shooter as far as resolution scaling goes.

Don't get me wrong, I think FPGA is a great option that exists. I was interested in the concept a few years before the Mister was a thing. I prefer software emulation for other reasons that are specific to me, and I love the convenience of save states and rewind. But input lag can now be virtually eliminated in emulation with a good setup, and "run ahead" is very easy to dial in right. Even if it has to be tweaked by core and game, it's a trivial process.