Analogue Pocket limited editions a scalpers paradise

[Fasterthannothing]

Summary

Analogue has released yet another limited edition device while their standard model appears to be non existent

 

Quotes

Quote

The Transparent Limited Edition Analogue Pocket line included 7 color options: Clear, black, red, blue, orange, green, and purple. They were available in such a limited quantity that all of them sold out entirely in under 10 minutes, even with their $250 price tag.

Engadget used a single word to describe it, as well as every Analogue drop prior, as “frustrating”. The Glow-In-The-Dark version sold out in just as much time if not quicker, earlier this month.

 

The company seems to thrive on scarcity, as eBay scalpers already have a ton of them available and sold for around $400 (a full $150 higher than they were this morning), just hours after they sold out.

 

My thoughts

Analogue seems more worried about releasing limited edition consoles than actual selling products like some hypebeast Yeezy sneaker drop. They have one of if not the absolute best portable hardware emulator devices available with a beautiful 1600x1400 display that never seems to actually be for sale unless you like buying them from a scalper.

 

Sources

 https://www.gamecrate.com/the-console-you-probably-won-t-get-your-hands-on-limited-edition-transparent-analogue-pocket

 

https://www.engadget.com/analogues-limited-edition-pockets-are-delightful-and-frustrating-140012471.html

[TempestCatto]

It seems like you're far better off getting an ROG Ally and emulating.

[Fasterthannothing]

3 minutes ago, TempestCatto said:

It seems like you're far better off getting an ROG Ally and emulating.

That's a huge price difference and nothing does hardware emulation like the Analogue. People have been waiting since 2021 before they got one that's crazy to me. It was easier to buy a new GPU at the peak of the mining craze than one of these.

[williamcll]

Yeah no this is way overpriced.

[TempestCatto]

14 hours ago, Fasterthannothing said:

That's a huge price difference and nothing does hardware emulation like the Analogue. People have been waiting since 2021 before they got one that's crazy to me. It was easier to buy a new GPU at the peak of the mining craze than one of these.

True. But one can also actually get their hands on an Ally, plus you can play far more than just emulated games. From a price standpoint, the Ally has more value.

[IkeaGnome]

14 hours ago, Fasterthannothing said:

That's a huge price difference and nothing does hardware emulation like the Analogue. People have been waiting since 2021 before they got one that's crazy to me. It was easier to buy a new GPU at the peak of the mining craze than one of these.

Does the price difference really matter if you can't get one? How many people during the last GPU shortage went down a tier or two in graphics card because it's what they could get, not what made sense?

[Fasterthannothing]

2 hours ago, IkeaGnome said:

Does the price difference really matter if you can't get one? How many people during the last GPU shortage went down a tier or two in graphics card because it's what they could get, not what made sense?

That's fair but even a scalped one cost less than a ally now an even better comparison is the steam deck at $400 but it's unfortunate that analogue has such a cool niche product for hardware level emulation and can't do anything but make limited editions for scalpers to buy 

[Kisai]

18 hours ago, Fasterthannothing said:

That's a huge price difference and nothing does hardware emulation like the Analogue. People have been waiting since 2021 before they got one that's crazy to me. It was easier to buy a new GPU at the peak of the mining craze than one of these.

Guys, the Analogue Pocket is not a crappy software emulator box. It's a dual FPGA re-implementation of the hardware. It's expensive because it aims for hardware accurate emulation by emulating the hardware chips. 

 

It costs as much as it does because FPGA's are not cheap. If you just want to play pirated games, go right ahead and play them on the software emulators on your PC or Raspberry Pi. This device is not for those people.

 

This device is for people who want to play GB/GBA and other handheld console games on a handheld console designed as a handheld console accurately.  There have been dozens of crappy software emulators that can't play the physical games before, just google "steamdeck alternatives"

[Fasterthannothing]

19 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Guys, the Analogue Pocket is not a crappy software emulator box. It's a dual FPGA re-implementation of the hardware. It's expensive because it aims for hardware accurate emulation by emulating the hardware chips. 

 

It costs as much as it does because FPGA's are not cheap. If you just want to play pirated games, go right ahead and play them on the software emulators on your PC or Raspberry Pi. This device is not for those people.

 

This device is for people who want to play GB/GBA and other handheld console games on a handheld console designed as a handheld console accurately.  There have been dozens of crappy software emulators that can't play the physical games before, just google "steamdeck alternatives"

Yes and unfortunately it's the only one that does this. It's just sad they have such an amazing product with zero care for their consumers actually trying to buy it.

[Mark Kaine]

What do you mean hardware emulation,  do you think RPCS3 runs on thin air???

 

this thing is a nothing burger gimmicky device in my eyes

 

 

[Fasterthannothing]

4 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

What do you mean hardware emulation,  do you think RPCS3 runs on thin air???

 

 

 

Traditional emulation uses standard CPU and software to achieve play back of the games. This system allows developers to run the bios of the console directly on the hardware and run everything as if it was being played directly on the hardware of the console.

[Mark Kaine]

2 hours ago, Fasterthannothing said:

Traditional emulation uses standard CPU and software to achieve play back of the games. This system allows developers to run the bios of the console directly on the hardware and run everything as if it was being played directly on the hardware of the console.

yeah, well, standard cpu yes.... i guess i don't get how this differs, did they "remake" the original cpu? and if so how's that legal? 

[Fasterthannothing]

47 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

yeah, well, standard cpu yes.... i guess i don't get how this differs, did they "remake" the original cpu? and if so how's that legal? 

They used fpga which is a processing architecture that can be modified on the fly to behave the same at the hardware level as the physical hardware that the bios is looking for.

 

Quote

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are integrated circuits often sold off-the-shelf. They're referred to as 'field programmable' because they provide customers the ability to reconfigure the hardware to meet specific use case requirements after the manufacturing process.

 

[Mark Kaine]

4 hours ago, Fasterthannothing said:

They used fpga which is a processing architecture that can be modified on the fly to behave the same at the hardware level as the physical hardware that the bios is looking for.

ah, ok interesting... could this be also used to replace modern desktop cpus, or is it not powerful enough? 

 

edit: it seems to be more like a gpu than cpu? that said i don't understand why we need cpus anyway,  just use 2 gpus, should be way faster! (and yeah i know architecture would need to be changed) 

 

like it could "emulate" a Ryzen and run windows,  then it could switch and emulate a CELL and play Playstation games ... 

 

 

[Fasterthannothing]

12 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

ah, ok interesting... could this be also used to replace modern desktop cpus, or is it not powerful enough? 

It's not powerful enough from my understanding. It's typical used in CPU prototype design but they figured out how to use it for emulation 

[Mark Kaine]

1 minute ago, Fasterthannothing said:

It's not powerful enough from my understanding. It's typical used in CPU prototype design but they figured out how to use it for emulation 

i see... yeah i tried to figure it out, some amds from years ago should be about as powerful than a 3600 (1.2tf) but im not sure i got this right lol 

[Forbidden Wafer]

On 9/30/2023 at 11:17 PM, Fasterthannothing said:

That's a huge price difference and nothing does hardware emulation like the Analogue. People have been waiting since 2021 before they got one that's crazy to me. It was easier to buy a new GPU at the peak of the mining craze than one of these.

Meh, I wanted to buy an Analogue Pocket, but after trying an Anbernic 351V (80 USD) I don't really see the point.

The games I wanted to play are so old, there are a billion tricks to make things more responsive and performant.

[Thaldor]

I can kind of get why they would be more into releasing limited edition pieces that they can sell on higher price in smaller numbers while keeping some kind of shroud of "must to get" device.

 

Getting the real hardware to run the games isn't that hard and probably lands on the same price point so what you're paying for mostly is the brand new skin and illuminated screen (which can be modded to almost any of the supported handhelds). So, they're going to try to sell $100 (+adapters) device to a fraction of a quite small customer base, the retro gamers who are into handhelds and want to be some kind of purists. I put the "purist" term there because at least what I know there really isn't a single handheld (except more modern ones which aren't supported by Analogue) that would have software emulation problems, so, it's not like trying to play Duck hunt on modern TV's which is impossible but more a question about just wanting to do it "the right way". "Some kind of purist" because the target person must not want to run the games on the original hardware for a reason or other but must want to use the original cartridges (or flash cards, pick your poison).
There's of course the special cases like musicians wanting to use the sound chips (I don't remember GBs, NGP or Lynx having any super special sound chips that couldn't be software emulated) but for those I believe a better product would be FPGA the needed part and attach the connectors needed by the users.

 

And no, I don't think Analogue Pocket is a product for those who own stuff like Game Boy Printer or camera or other more interesting accessories because they probably already have the original hardware to use with them.

 

TL;DR: They have so small customer base the first real patch of consoles most likely would satisfy all the demand so selling limited editions while holding back the real release brings them nice profits and probably for a longer time.

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, Thaldor said:

"Some kind of purist" because the target person must not want to run the games on the original hardware for a reason or other but must want to use the original cartridges (or flash cards, pick your poison).

There is also a dock for the pocket so you can legitimately play GB/GBC/GBA titles on a television, or capture it for a stream. Or any other FPGA core like the GG/SMS, Colecovision, etc. You're on your own for some of the FPGA cores.

 

Like it's powerful enough to emulate most pre - 32-bit game consoles. To emulate something much harder than a Genesis/Amiga 500/68K Mac requires various kinds of multi-chip hardware implementations.

 

As for who these FPGA console's are for. They are purposely designed for people who own the PHYSICAL GAMES. Most people are going to jailbreak it and just run whatever they want on it, and that's perfectly OK by Analogue. Without that ability to play the original cartridges, the device is legally dubious.

[TetraSky]

Quick question : If emulating softwares is a grey zone for copyright... What is emulating hardware?

[Fasterthannothing]

3 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Quick question : If emulating softwares is a grey zone for copyright... What is emulating hardware?

It's not because it's fpga which allows for reprogramming the chip on the fly. Hardware isn't emulated when the actual gates on the chip are being reprogrammed on the fly. It would fall under a type of reverse engineering for legal purposes from my understanding of the legalities of it.

[Kisai]

10 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Quick question : If emulating softwares is a grey zone for copyright... What is emulating hardware?

You can't "copy" a chip per se.

 

As it is, people who re-implement the chip's do so by testing the i/o bus with oscilloscope while it operates. So this is easier to do so by knowing what the underlying instruction set is, and then you only have to figure out the mystery functions and bugs. FPGA re-implementations are pretty much 100% as far as CPU, GPU, RAM, I/O etc. There is a second stage where the actual DAC's the real device would output an analog signal, but on the FPGA devices, this second stage actually is a scan doubler that outputs HDMI all in one step so there's no latency. Your typical software emulator has to emulate everything, and then take that 240p image and scale/filter it up in multiple steps and feed it back into the OS and GPU, so you have to cheat by skipping i/o steps if you want accurately timed emulation, which has drawbacks in accurate music or visuals.

 

This is why "speed running" on an emulator is considered cheating, because there are things that can be exploited on a software emulator that you can't on the original hardware, and can't on FPGA hardware. This is why back in the day of Nintendo Power "send us your high scores" you had to take a photo of the NES/SNES and the television to prove that you didn't use a game genie.

 

The amount of effort taken to re-implement the SNES is actually quite substantial since there are multiple chips involved, and they're not exactly off-the-shelf parts. The FPGA developer basically removes the chips individually and puts the chip on a separate PCB so the i/o lines can be monitored, and also the FPGA CPU core can be swapped in on the same board to see if it behaves the same.

 

It's specialized and expensive to do.

 

Software emulation comes from the other side, where "we know" what the software was written for, and basically start with software cores that run the emulator at kiloherz frequencies until the software boots successfully. 

 

N64 and later console emulation is taken to another level called dynamic recompilation, which instead of trying to emulate the hardware on an instruction level, emulates the SDK of the OS it expects to find. This is how emulation of the PS3, PS4, GC, Wii, Wii U, Xbox 360, etc are done. This is also why you don't necessarily need the host OS, but you also kind of do to have access to the decryption keys, which is why emulation that uses the firmware of the device is always "illegal" if you didn't dump it yourself, but also illegal under the DMCA DRM protections.

 

There is no legal way to play software on a device that is not the original device. You have to violate the DMCA DRM provisions or basic copyright laws to get the game software or the OS/Firmware in the first place. If you FPGA emulate just the hardware, then you could, literately desolder the firmware off an original console and plug that right into your FPGA console, no other parts needed. That would be the "legit" way. Nobody is going to go through that effort though when you can dump the firmware itself.

 

Which comes back to this entire argument around emulators being illegal, flash carts being illegal, and so forth. For all general consideration as a "I wanna home brew" is a BS reason that nobody actually does.

 

The Analogue pocket lets you make home brew software at a GB/GBC/GBA level without needing to violate Nintendo's rights. How many games have come out for the Analogue Pocket? Go ahead and try to find a single game without knowing the title of one.

 

That's right, nobody is buying it to do that. All the top search results will be "where do I find (illegal) copies of games to run", and even if you find a list, it will be entirely lists of 8-bit and 16-bit console games. Not homebrew titles.

 

Now, to it's credit the entire openFPGA part of the pocket is what makes it interesting. Because it doesn't have to be a GB/GBC/GBA emulator

https://openfpga-cores-inventory.github.io/analogue-pocket/

You can use it to emulate arcade hardware, you can use it to emulate devices that weren't even game consoles, you can use it to emulate hardware that hasn't existed in 60 years.