What is this? Why is it so expensive? What the hell is an FPGA?
Fair questions. Some context and a bit of a history lesson..
Analogue is a company that specializes in hardware clones of older video game systems. You may have heard of the
$5000 Gold Plated NES, or the more
reasonably priced $500 version sans-gold plating known as the Analogue Nt. They built these by taking apart cosmetically broken down famicoms and re-purposing it in a fancy box with some nice mods such as HDMI out. They have done some boutique-ass stuff in the past however lately their focus has been to recreate hardware at more cost effective price points using FPGA chips.
An FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is a sort of chameleon chip that can have code loaded to change what it is and does as a computer chip. Typically these exist for student and company prototypes that can be later turned into finalized chip designs. A side effect of their flexible nature had them showing up in game and hobby projects such as flash drives which over time developed into full blown hardware emulation of more complex systems such as the NES. These more complex emulated systems are often referred to as cores. Hence you will see 'NES core' or 'Game Boy core' used. The two popular forms of this was the
Nt Mini (the next version of the Analogue Nt mentioned above), and the
AVS.
This is emulation in that it is emulating another system however it is doing it at the hardware level, rather than virtualizing the system in software as with emulators you are probably familiar with. Hardware emulation has some nice benefits, for example being able to plug the original controller in directly for low latency input, or plugging in an original cartridge and playing the game directly off the cartridge as it would in an original system, not dumping and playing from the ROM like you typically see with software emulator boxes that have a cartridge port like the Retron. If you can plug it into the original system you can probably plug it in here and it will work if the core is well made.
A common misconception is that because it is hardware emulation it is immediately superior to software emulators. This is not true. The quality of the emulation whether hardware or software comes down to the knowledge and skill of the engineer building the emulator. There are pro's and con's to both of these approaches, but don't fall for the lines of it being inherently better just because it is.
FPGAs are not produced in mass market quantities like the CPU in your computer so the more powerful you need it to be (to emulate more powerful hardware) the more the price goes up exponentially. As it is right now a product in the $100-$200 range is typically powerful enough to emulate 8-bit and 16-bit hardware, or handhelds such as with the Analogue Pocket. To do something like the PS2 would require an insanely expensive FPGA and an insane amount of engineering hours. As with many technology trends prices are likely to improve as time moves forward and demand increases, but this is roughly the point we are at currently.
Alright, so what is so special about this particular FPGA system?
This is the first one in an easily available handheld form factor. All the other systems up to this point have been a console you plug into your TV. (Which this will
also do with the dock.)
In addition, Analogue has been very restrictive with their FPGA systems up to now. Only their code could be loaded into their systems restricting it to only their updates and enhancements for new features or cores. To summarize a much more complicated set of events over the past few years another project started up around the idea of building open source versions of these hardware cores. MiSTer. This community has grown rapidly with many systems being emulated. Up to this point the Analogue cores and the MiSTer cores were their own islands.
People are excited about the Analogue Pocket because it is the first time Analogue has opened up their hardware to allow other developers to load their own cores. Meaning we could potentially, and likely will see other systems available such as the NES, SNES, Mega Drive, or a plethora of others, in addition to the GB/GBC/GBA/etc that the system will already have. The FPGA used in the Analogue Pocket is not as powerful as the primary one used in the MiSTer community so every single core may not be possible, but it looks to be quite capable with the limited information we have so far.
Okay, but you said it plays off the carts. How the hell do I plug an NES cart into this thing?
Being that this is hardware emulation that can emulate just about any aspect of the system, the cartridge itself can also be emulated. Essentially a mini built-in flashcart that can load roms rather than play the cart directly. Analogue does not officially support this feature for reasons you can guess, but shortly after they release their products a mysterious crusader puts out a jailbroken version of the firmware that has this feature. Nobody knows the identify of this brave soul, but we sing tribute to them anyway...
