Razieluigi

I hacked a 3DS a few months back so I'm looking forward to messing around with this a bit.

This is all super exciting. I've been itching to build a MiSTer, but I'll keep my ear to the ground about this alternative.

As a side note, while Udon's assessment of Analogue's products is correct, I actually preferred them when they were single-purpose. The Pocket has finally grown into its skin, due almost entirely to the efforts of external developers rather than Analogue itself. But it still feels half-baked to me compared to the comparatively simple but excellent Mega SG and Super NT that will forever be gems in my hardware collection. They were products that did one thing extremely well, and I think there's a lot of value in that.

Man, I've wanted a LED calculator for ages. This fits the bill, and having it double as a numpad is a nice perk.

I hope they sell the ROM as well. I'm a little wary of buying cartridges nowadays unless I really trust the manufacturer to make them correctly.

Assuming they do, I'm looking forward to playing this once it's released.

I'll definitely be grabbing one of these when it's available. Mine is still working, but I don't know how long that will be true and it sounds like this is genuinely well made. Even RetroRGB gave it a nod, and he's usually pretty wary of aftermarket PSUs.

The hangup about hints and cheat codes is especially bizarre since discovering those secrets was such an essential part of gaming culture back then. I was always on the lookout for those bits of information, whether it be from magazines or just passed around by word of mouth.

The slow trickle of hints and tips gave games very long tails in that era. You didn't buy games and polish them off in a week. They were played for months, and often left unfinished due to their frequently brutal diffiuclty. If anything, hints and tips kept the games relevant and increased their value. They made me eager to go home and try those tricks and to see and do things I hadn't been able to do before. This culture was so widespread and intense that all these years later, I know tips and tricks for games I didn't even own at the time!

Things honestly don't look "destroyed" so much as "on the floor."

Vandalism or not, it's hard to imagine this would be that expensive to fix, much less a business-ending catastrophe.

@-wc- Ha. I hear that.

My digital library is meticulously organized and backed up. Movies, music, games, photographs... Hell, my current PC is still home to high school homework assignments done on a Windows 3.1 PC back in the mid-90s! I back everything up locally to labeled hard drives at least once a month or after a major change, as well as to the cloud using iDrive. And when I migrate to a new machine, literally everything comes along for the ride.

Which, to your point, is a lot of work compared to keeping some LPs on a shelf

@-wc- Yeah, also agreed. I'm not a big vinyl guy, but I get why people like it for analog music. I do also appreciate the extras like cover art and wahtnot.

But for archival purposes, it seems that the ideal way to archive chip music is digitally. It has the potential to be 100% accurate and can be infinitely reproduced with zero loss.

Honestly, with chiptunes the biggest obstacle to accuracy is the hardware used to play it, because the data itself stands a very good chance of being flawless.

This is all really unfortunate. I hope LRG responds clearly and gets its act together, but they've shown little intention to do so.

That said... I do not understand the idea of purchasing chip tunes on vinyl. Say what you will about vinyl when it comes to analog music, but there isn't even a valid argument to be made that this is the intended way to listen to music specifically written to be generated by a chip and pumped directly to speakers.

What a fun connection!

I'm not even a big Godzilla fan, but Godzilla Minus One was astonishing. It wasn't just good or enjoyable or fun, although it was certainly those things. It felt real and powerful. I left the theater feeling like I had watched something important.

Nice. Always good to have more FPGA NES clones out there since Analogue has discontinued theirs.

I have a Retro AVS and absolutely love it. I have yet to run into an emulation issue, and it works perfectly with an Everdrive. It's a high quality product despite the rinky-dink webpage you order them from.

This might be a nice alternative if I needed the additional outputs, but I'm good with HDMI only.

@Steel76 Different strokes and all, but I love having the two markets merged. I loved the GB, GBA, DS, and 3DS, for sure. But portable gaming had been losing its identity anyway as devices started delivering increasingly "console-like" experiences, and the competition from tablets and phones makes it harder to sell a dedicated hand-held gaming device.

And given that the Switch has been an unmitigated success for Nintendo, I don't imagine they have plans to rock this boat any time soon.

@Poodlestargenerica Yes, that part of the "everything else you said."

I appreciate you expanding on the thought, though! It did a good job of confirming that it is most definitely nonsense.

@Poodlestargenerica What a silly comment.

It's fine to not like the series. Everything else you said is nonsense.

I find projects like this technically interesting, but don't love the idea of "fixing" the music from older games.

One of the pleasures of classic console gaming is the unique fingerprint that the hardware left on its software. The sights and sounds of a SNES game were fundamentally different than the sights and sounds of a game — even the exact same game — running on Genesis.

Again, super cool as a tech demo. But once you start robbing these games of those hardware signatures, what's the point of running the software on that hardware to begin with?

This is awesome. Great article.

Sometimes I miss the golden age of passwords before save games. They allowed a whole playground subculture of code-sharing and secrets.

And a few years ago I was playing through Demon's Crest on my Super NT, and appreciated the ability to pick up playing my game on Switch.

Despite being a Sega fan in general, this is a console I really have yet to explore. I loved my Genesis, but then I went off to school and kind of just missed the entire 5th generation. Studying and parties played a role, but so did the fact that it was a golden era for PC gaming and our dorm was wired like one big LAN.

It was eventually the Dreamcast that pulled me back in to console gaming again.

One day I need to find an old Saturn to mod and give it a shot.

Cryptocurrency exists primarily to prove that "there's a sucker born every minute" was a spectacular underestimate.

Baldur's Gate 3 may be a brilliant game, but the notion that it has not one but TWO characters deemed more "iconic" than pretty much any major character from the Super Mario franchise is preposterous.

I'd argue that any run-of-the-mill Goomba is more globally recognizable than Astarion.

I mean, that's definitely in keeping with the sense of humor of the game. Hard to be that upset about it, especially when Sega of America was busy ***** all over Nintendo in official commercials.

The first game was completely mis-marketed in the US with that dull sci-fi box art that didn't even hint at the goofball spirit of what was inside. And Battle Mania 2, which never saw release outside of Japan, is among the best shooters on the console.

I'd love to see the pair of them re-released at some point. I'd leap at the chance to buy actual cartridges, but at the very least they need to be added to NSO. They're lost classics and deserve some modern appreciation.

I'll be booting this up tonight to check out that little Easter Egg!

Final Fantasy 4, 5, and 6 represent a remarkable hat-trick. The kind of talent and vision on display across those three titles borders on supernatural, and decades later it still boggles the mind to see what they accomplished on the hardware.

But if I could only play one of them for the rest of my life, it would be Final Fantasy 6. It's a masterpiece and the series would never again know such heights. (FF9 probably comes the closest, though)

I first played it with a friend the summer before college. Since then, I've played through it several times and in several different forms. Most recently, I enjoyed the Pixel Remaster just a few months ago. I expect I'll continue to revisit it every now and then for the rest of my life.

It's certainly one of the most important games of all time, and it remains immensely enjoyable today.

But I think efforts to declare the "best game" of all time are silly. There's far too much variety in gaming (or any form of media, really) to funnel it all down like this. How do you even compare a game like OoT to something like Tetris? Or Pac-Man? Or Disco Elysium? Games can be great in such starkly different ways.

It's not just apples and oranges. It's apples, oranges, dragonflies, clarinets, and motorcycles.

You can always count on something creative and interesting from Lucas Pope. Just downloaded this today and looking forward to giving it a go!

I bought an Anbernic Nano for the novelty of it. It's a neat little thing (and looks awesome in red) but I can't say I use it much.

Still, it's cool to see all these different devices out there. It's really made it easy for retro gamers across the spectrum from dabbling to enthusiast to get exactly what they need at a fair price.

Interesting! I'd argue that Daedalian Opus already made use of a very similar concept on GameBoy. Not exactly the same, of course. It has more discrete tangram-style puzzles each with a definitive win state, and the pieces are pentaminos rather than tetraminos, but it retains the core idea of maximizing coverage of a space with Tetris-style blocks.

I feel like Bloodlines and Contra: Hard Corps represent an alternate universe of Konami games where the developers felt a little more free to let down their hair and get weird.

Each of them is one of the best games in their respective franchises, in my opinion. They make fantastic use of Sega's hardware and it's great to see them getting more respect in recent years than they did upon release.

Hard to argue with anything here, but the hair-splitter in me just doesn't see the Switch or the Steam Deck as portables.

I know that they are in the literal sense, but they've been so successful in breaking down the walls between portable and console/PC that I think they've created a new classification entirely.

I guess I just think there's a difference between portable hardware and an inherently portable platform.

I'm not entirely sure what the record is, but good job Hamster!

@wiiware Yeah. In fairness, most of my gaming on Pocket is by way of FPGA cores now. But I'm the kind of weirdo that would still prefer to play a game on cartridge if I own it.

It would be great to be able to do things like re-map start and select in the Gameboy Zelda games, for instance. My old-ass thumbs don't like bending down to hit those little buttons anymore

@wiiware It only has button mapping when playing FPGA cores.

Inexplicably, they haven't implemented it for cartridge games.

I was really hoping to see button remapping in one of these updates. Such an obvious thing for any modern console to include.

Still, it's nice to see this thing finally approaching feature-complete status 2 years after launching. Looking forward to the FPGA Lynx cores when they finally arrive.

@Poodlestargenerica Which is kind of exactly their point.

If they only have, say, Lynx carts...

Still waiting for a Dynamite Cop heart rate monitor, myself.

What a heartbreaking story. I hope the owner is able to find some way to rebuild, both literally and figuratively.

Oh wow. This is an awesome addition.

Thank god for all the independent developers doing such amazing work on Pocket. Meanwhile it's more than 2 years post launch and Analogue hasn't been able to get Lynx support out the door on its own hardware.

@PKDuckman Whoa, Nelly! You're being extremely defensive and I'm not sure why. I'm not anti-Xbox. I own a Series S and do not own a PS5. GamePass is fantastic. But the situation is what it is. XBox is clearly flailing and throwing all manner of things at the wall in the hopes that some of it sticks.

I don't think that Sony bringing some titles to PC has the same impact on the console industry as MS bringing their games to Playstation. Obviously there's some crossover, but PC is kind of its own animal. If we were seeing a game like Horizon on Xbox, then you'd have a fair point.

We get it. You love XBox and dislike Sony. And that's fine! Game how you want — I certainly do. But nothing you've written even pretends to explain why Sony has been absolutely cleaning XBox's clock this generation. And make no mistake, they are.

If it's not exclusives, what are you suggesting that it is? What is Sony doing that MS isn't? And what can MS do to fix the problem?

Gorgeous. That case is perfection! I kept my OG Dreamcast preserved as-is, but did build a second one with a MODE.

This kind of project would be too big for me, but I'd love to have a mini-DC one day. Although I'd prefer an option that doesn't involve cannibalizing a real one.

Blackley's enthusiasm seems misplaced at best and performative at worst.

Microsoft is in an impossible position unless it finally leverages all the talent it has purchased to create some exclusives that give the brand an identity. We've long passed the point of diminishing returns on hardware specs, no matter what kind of "technological leap" XBox supposedly has in store. This is an industry with a long history of big promises that don't deliver — I'd argue the entire current generation is one — and we should expect no different here.

Sony isn't winning because its hardware is measurably better. It's winning because it has high-value exclusives, and Xbox is really foundering in that regard. Starfield launched with a whimper. Indiana Jones could be cool, I suppose? But it's still an unproven entity while Sony is luring players with established brands that they spent the entire last generation building excitement around. It's hard to make up for a full generation of missed opportunity.

The XBox brand has no rudder. And that's a real shame, not because of exhausting console war nonsense but becuase it's important for consumers that Sony has competition in the high-end console space.

I look forward to seeing what might be in store for XBox, but this week's display looked like a company trying to play-act having a plan rather than actually having one.

I don't think I've ever seen a house filled entirely with children's bedrooms before.

This is the most inexplicably long-running scam I've ever seen.

Even if this console actually existed, it's an absurd design with a tragic lineup of amateurish games. I don't understand how it ever generated any excitement at all, much less enough to continue the grift for 4 years.

And it's still going! Who is still throwing money at this?

@Lukaaa640 It doesn't matter if it's real.

We respond with real emotions to fictional things all the time. We laugh, cry, and feel joy in response to movies, music, books, and games. There wouldn't be much point to art or entertainment it if we didn't.

The irony of people being so easily triggered by trigger warnings will never be lost on me.

Nonsense. Vanquish is better than all three of those games.

Absolute classic from Platinum's heyday.

There's no harm in including the warning, and from a preservation standpoint it's preferable to bowdlerizing the game itself and pretending it never happened.

I feel like people who carry on about trigger warnings are demonstrating the exact same snowflake behavior they claim to be protesting. Get over it.

@Damo Ha - no worry. But I was excited to find out what was so controversial!

Nice. I feel like FPGA core development has slowed on the Pocket recently, and didn't pick up much after the recent firmware update.

Hoping to see a Lynx core once the lo(oooooooo)ng-awaited adapters are available, too.

Just a correction — the official book description on Amazon is "comprehensive yet conversational," not controversial.

Looks interesting! I'll be curious to see some reviews once it's out there.

Nostalgia wants me to give it to something in the GameBoy line, but rationality requires me to give it to the 3DS.

What a treasure trove of amazing experiences, many of which would be very difficult to pull off on any other hardware without significant compromise.

I miss 90s games.

I don't miss edgelord 90s gaming ads.

I just connected my DC the other night to show a friend Crazy Taxi and I've been playing it since.

I have so many DC controllers, but I might have to consider adding one of these...