I love this tech aesthetic. 90s Japanese tech is just fun to look at.

I remember seeing these for $30 in Toys R Us clearance bins and I still kick my kid self for not picking one up.

It really is though.

The music was great, the Triple Triad card game actually was fun and had depth, card and item crafting was excellent, the draw system required a totally different approach to battles, it had a unique atmosphere, an open world map that actually had secrets to explore and not just an illusion of freedom to frame the story, interesting unique characters compared to most RPGs… I could go on.

I made so many Reddit comments on threads where everyone was falling over themselves to talk about VII and IX, got routinely ignored, but never doubted VIII was worth defending.

I’m by no means an Analogue fanboy, but the Analogue Pocket would be my pick. The screen filter/emulation on the super-high-res screen, super low latency, portability with dockable functionality, retro form factor, and it covers all the systems that are “retro” in my mind (pre-PS1). I think others may prefer a Steam Deck or Odin or other more powerful handheld to emulate better systems or have more seamless save states.

If you don’t have cartridges, at the moment it may be hard to justify the price. The reason is the screen - it is so high resolution, it will emulate sub-pixel LCD screen characteristics from the original GB/GBC/GG screens, BUT ONLY for physical cartridges OR GB/GBC games that have been converted to .pocket files (you can do this easily, but it’s still an extra step).

So for most people, it will play similar to the much cheaper Miyoo Mini or other Chinese emulation handhelds.

However, there has been a long-held expectation that Analogue will enable display mode options in the OpenFPGA cores, which would erase this handicap and mean absolutely, if you want to get the real experience of these systems, this is the only game in town. But it hasn’t happened yet. You may not be able to buy a system later though, when it happens, so it’s kind of a gamble.

An $80 kit that has an FPGA and swappable cores, super-high resolution screen, to build a machine in a similarly portable form factor? Where exactly have you seen that?

Ah, I see now, thanks.

Just curious, where are you seeing $550 for the Analogue?

I’ll throw Boxxle on the list. It’s one of the earliest GB games, so the graphics are pretty much what you’d expect. But it’s a great puzzle game that has a very simple premise, but requires you to perspective-shift and learn new strategies many times over as the difficulty progresses.