ANALOGUE HISTORY
Analogue has always been in the business of making high-end consoles. “When I founded Analogue I was obsessed with craftsmanship,” says Christopher. “The intention behind each of our original products was for them to be the end all, be all, pedestal enthusiast product in their category – while being designed with an attention to detail never before seen in the category, and manufactured from materials that are reserved for products in the thousands of dollars at a radically lower price point.”
The company’s first product was its Neo Geo Consolised MVS, which launched in 2011. Housed in a premium wood case, the system accepted Neo Geo arcade cartridges and included all of the options you could hope for – the popular UNIBIOS was included as standard, as were composite, S-video, component and RGB video outputs.
This, of course, came with a premium price,
$649 with no controllers. “The woodworker who hand-made every Analogue Neo Geo product’s full-time job was working with extraordinarily rare materials – wood from sunken ships or hundreds of years old,” says Chistopher. “His skill level is of a master craftsman and the price we sold these products for were a fraction of what they would cost in any other category (non-videogames).”
The company’s next system, the Analogue Nt, was an attempt to build the ultimate NES experience using CPU and PPU chips from Famicom systems described as “cosmetically undesirable/unsellable”. This included slots for both Famicom and NES cartridges, RGB output with selectable palettes, four controller ports, the Famicom expansion port and more. The system was another attractive device for retro gaming enthusiasts, this time created from solid aluminium blocks, and cost $499 at launch in 2014. “Only the people who worked on this product know just how difficult it was for us to make this product for the price we made it at,” explains Christopher. “It required myself and our head of production, Ernest Dorazio, to hand-quality-check every individual piece of the product one by one, on the floor at factories – hand-assemble every unit, hand-test every unit and, of course, ship them all ourselves one by one. If we didn’t do all the work ourselves, the product wouldn’t have been possible.”
Analogue moved into a new era in 2017, with the release of the Nt Mini. While offering similar features to the previous Nt, this system ran from Kevin Horton’s FPGA core rather than original chips, and was smaller and slightly cheaper at $449. The next Fpga-based console was the Snes-compatible Super Nt in 2018, which saw Analogue move closer to mass-market pricing. Using high-quality plastics, cutting back on legacy video outputs and sticking to two controller ports helped to bring the price of the system down, and two games were built into the system – Super Turrican 2 and the previously unreleased Super Turrican: The Director’s Cut. The Mega Drive-compatible Mega Sg followed a similar model in 2019, and included the formerly unreleased Ultracore, as well as an adapter for Master System games.
When we say ‘handheld games’, we’re not being vague for the sake of it. The Analogue Pocket will run Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games out of the box, and support is being built in for Lynx, Game Gear and Neo Geo Pocket games via cartridge adapters. So why has it turned to this class of systems now? “Handheld game systems are another category of videogame history that are riddled with issues,” says Christopher. “Extremely low-quality displays, no backlights, limited to one platform etc. Pocket solves all these issues elegantly.”
It’s hard to deny the positives of such a console. It’s already a struggle to find a working Game Gear in the wild, and it’d be lovely to have a less batteryhungry Lynx. While older Game Boy devices are more likely to work, and do so without costing you a fortune in batteries, they suffered from severe motion blur issues. Even the most recent of the Pocket’s supported platforms suffers from issues – the original Game Boy Advance is notorious for its poor non-backlit LCD screen, and models with better displays are now prized. With the Pocket, Analogue is promising a piece of hardware that will redefine your relationship with these systems’ libraries. “Analogue was founded to help elevate the medium of videogames – a call to respect its history,” says Christopher. “Our goal is to make products that allow people to explore the history of videogames in an unprecedented way. I mean, would you rather watch Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey on VHS or Blu-ray? There is just no contest.”
That sort of improvement might seem like a lofty claim, but actions speak louder than words and the company’s recent consoles have been very impressive. The last one we tested, the Mega Drive-compatible Mega Sg, offers crisp 1080p
HDMI output and no added lag. Players can adjust the console’s image to their liking – as well as a variety of scaling options that offer a fine degree of control, the console allows you to add scanlines and other filters, and even blend the dithering patterns often found in Mega Drive games. Sound is often the difference between the best and worst Mega Drive products, and the Mega Sg allows players a high degree of control to achieve their desired audio experience. Compatibility is superb, too, with the system supporting almost all peripherals by default, and even including an edge connector for use with Mega-cd. While the system was not perfect out of the box (it had some issues with Mega-cd games, particularly Chuck Rock), for most purposes, it actually surpasses the original system.
What makes Analogue’s systems different to others on the market is the use of Field-programmable Gate Array technology – or FPGA for short. The engineer behind this is Kevin ‘Kevtris’ Horton, who has a long history in the retro gaming scene. “I got interested around 1995 after reading about the Atari 2600. My first videogame system engineering was on the 2600, then in 1997 I moved onto the NES and it just went from there,” says Kevin. “I was part of the early NES dev crew that hung out on IRC back then. Every week there was some new discovery or thing being uncovered. It was a pretty magical time.” Kevin hasn’t been working with Analogue for a long time. “In 2015, Analogue contacted me about my Hi-def NES project, which adds HDMI to your old-school NES. They wished to include it inside their Nt product, which was an aluminium encased NES/ Famicom cartridge-playing videogame system. You could purchase the system with RGB output or HDMI output. The latter option was provided by my board.” Since then, Kevin has done the FPGA engineering for the Nt Mini, Super Nt, Mega Sg and now the pocket.
So, what does an FPGA do? At its most basic level, an FPGA is a chip that can be configured to behave like other hardware at the transistor level, using what is known as a hardware description language. That versatility has allowed for some huge developments in the retro gaming scene in recent times – the popular Open Source Scan Converter uses an FPGA for video processing, while Terraonion’s SD System 3 and Mega SD products use FPGA to substitute for the PC Engine CD and Mega-cd add-ons. “There is definitely an FPGA gold rush going on right now in the classic game market,” says Kevin. “I hope that this will only increase as time goes on, and more people are turned on to the power and fun of FPGA development and game-playing. There’s definitely a lot more ground that can and will be covered in the future and I can’t wait to see and experience it!” But Kevin’s work is more ambitious – he recreates entire consoles in FPGA. Where a software emulator interprets the original game code in a way that can be understood by the target hardware, Kevin essentially reconfigures the FPGA so that it acts like the original device at a hardware level.
Why do things this way? “With FPGA hardware a perfect recreation of the original hardware is possible, and it can interface with cartridges, controllers and other add-ons for the system,” Kevin explains.
“This is not possible with a software emulator; the closest you can get right now with software is hardware that simply ‘dumps’ the cartridge and runs it on the emulator. An FPGA actually runs the cartridge itself, and does not dump the game from it first. This means that any cartridge that runs on the original system can run on the FPGA.” Why might that matter? “People are writing new NES games all the time, with new cartridge hardware that the software emulators might not have the ability to run,” says Kevin. “An FPGA would have no trouble running it because it’s using the cartridge in the same way the original hardware can.” Where a software emulator would need to be updated to take these developments into account, a properly constructed Fpga-based system will run it immediately. Of course, being able to interface with the cartridge as a piece of hardware has other benefits – for example, a number of handheld games include special cartridge
Our goal is to make products that allow people to explore the history of videogames in an unprecedented way CHRISTOPHER TABER
hardware. Think about the built-in tilt sensor of Kirby’s Tilt ‘N’ Tumble, the rumble function of Pokémon Pinball or the solar sensor on Boktai: The Sun Is In Your Hand. All of these should work without issue on the Analogue Pocket.
In order to create an FPGA core, Kevin undertakes an arduous reverse-engineering process. “The first step is to do reading. Lots of reading. I can spend weeks reading up on the various quirks and documentation before anything is started. This gives me a good baseline on what I should expect,” he explains. “After that, custom hardware is created to ‘break out’ and hook up the baseline components to an FPGA. This lets me compare my recreation with the necessary components during development and make sure things match.” What kind of problems does he encounter during development? “The usual problems when developing a core ends up being DMA (direct memory access) and IRQ (interrupts). The timing on them has to be exact or else there will be at least one thing that doesn’t work. Having the original chips plugged in and ‘on tap’ helps a lot with this. On the Super Nt project, I devised hundreds of tests to tease out the behaviour of the DMA and IRQ logic on the CPU chip.”
This is an enormously costly and time-consuming task. “Every system Analogue develops is engineered completely in-house, from scratch. It’s an enormous effort and something we are incredibly passionate about,” says Christopher. “Kevin spent nearly 5,000 hours on our NES core alone. And that is an 8-bit core.” With six systems to support from day one, surely the Analogue Pocket must have taken an enormous amount of time to create? “There is definitely more time being spent on the Pocket than on some of our previous products,” confirms Kevin, and though he doesn’t elaborate on how much that might be, he does explain why. “The Pocket’s going to be breaking a lot of new ground compared to previous products; we have included a second helper FPGA this time to facilitate development of our cores, and the ability for people to port existing cores, and even write new ones for the system.”
That inclusion is a huge deal, as it gives the system enormous potential for expansion. “Our intention is to encourage developers to help preserve videogame history, too,” says Christopher. “Pocket is built with one Altera Cyclone V FPGA and one Cyclone 10. This implementation is to support third-party FPGA development accessing the Cyclone V. Developers are theoretically able to develop any core that Pocket’s hardware supports with access to our hardware to make things like cartridge adapters and other unique hardware accessories.” While nothing has been announced yet, this opens up some awesome possibilities. The Cyclone V is used in the Mega Sg and Super Nt, so adding support for something like the PC Engine or the Mega Drive should be entirely feasible – though naturally, that will require development of cartridge adapters, too. “I hope that people will write brandnew cores for the Pocket, and port existing ones,” says Kevin. “There is going to be a lot of capability included that can be used, and I hope this pleases developers. A thriving ecosystem around the Pocket is one of the design goals, and the hardware is set up to allow this to happen.” Christopher seems excited by this prospect too, saying, “With access to Analogue’s proprietary hardware and scalers, we think developers are going to do some amazing things.”
So the Pocket should run games authentically, but what about the system’s form factor? “The key for us was starting from the concept of a portrait-style handheld gaming device – which we think is the most iconic orientation of a portable gaming system,” says Christopher. “There hasn’t been a portrait-style handheld videogame system in a long time – we really wanted to bring this back. Almost all handhelds in the last 20 years are landscape style.” The system is minimalist in appearance – uniform in colour, with the exception of a single button on the side, and with a simple, classic button layout. “I think with all Analogue products we’re approaching the design with a ‘perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away’ philosophy,” explains Christopher. “One of my favourite features of the handheld is that all the buttons are blind – there is no labelling – button distinction is driven by a concave/convex system integrated with an intuitive mapping system in the user interface. One of the reasons we did this is because Pocket is a multisystem, so it’s appropriate to allow users to map on a system by system basis. And of course it is beautiful.”
With the Pocket relying on a classic body design, what will take the experience beyond the original devices is the system’s modern hardware. The inclusion of a rechargeable battery instantly makes Lynx and Game Gear games much more appealing, but according to Christopher, screen quality was chief amongst his concerns, and addressing this satisfactorily has been tough. “We’ve been working with suppliers for years to try and find the perfect display – one with the right aspect ratio, resolution, pixel density, color accuracy, pixel refresh and brightness. We finally were able to get the display of our dreams for retro aspect ratios,” he explains, referring to the system’s 1600x1440 LCD screen. “This isn’t a random display that is being retrofitted onto a portrait-style handheld – it is a pro-level display for its application. Ten times the resolution of an original Game Boy, seven and a half times the PPI. At three and a half inches in its aspect ratio, it’s the near equivalent to a 3DS XXL sized display.”
What does that mean in practice? Well, for original Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, you’ll get a perfect integer scale that fills the entire screen. Lynx games used 160x102, and should also be able to display at a perfect ten times integer scale that fills the whole width of the screen, but not the height. The Game Gear also used 160x144 as its primary resolution and you could therefore do the same, but the original system’s display is a 4:3 LCD, so this wouldn’t be an accurate way of doing things.
The Pocket’s going to be breaking a lot of new ground compared to previous products KEVIN HORTON