The Analogue Pocket Co. has always drawn attention, first for being the most convincing Game Boy successor ever announced and then for taking an unusually long time to release. But it did come out, and it was rather excellent. For others, its main flaw was that (for the most part) it could not merely load convenient ROM files and needed old, expensive physical cartridges to play games. If the Analogue Pocket was going to live up to the kids’ fantasies of becoming the greatest Game Boy gadget, it truly needed something they term a “jailbreak.”
That jailbreak simply snuck in the side door today. Setting the stage a little: When the Pocket was ultimately released in December of last year, it featured the most basic operating system and missed many of the capabilities that had been advertised for the device, such as save states that saved game progress. (Analogue also did not provide the first promised cart adapters for the Atari Lynx, Neo Geo Pocket, or TurboGrafx-16.)
Analogue Pocket’s New Archiving Gaming Hardware
Early adopters recognized it would take some time before the gadget in their hands was truly ready, as happy as they were to have their super Game Boys with gorgeous Retina-quality screens. The same held for would-be programmers wanting to add entertaining new features to the robust portable. Two field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are present in the Pocket, which may be modified by the software to closely resemble the hardware of another device.
Hobbyist developers could make great use of them by creating new FPGA cores—software that instructs the FPGAs how to arrange themselves—to replicate even more consoles. They are excellent for imitating vintage video gaming systems. However, that functionality was also postponed. Rewind to the present day. Finally, Analogue launched an updated version of their Analogue OS for the Pocket at 8:00 AM PT. The long-awaited “Library” and “Memories” features have finally been added to Analogue Pocket OS v1.1 beta; the one shows details about games you input, while the second is essentially saving states.
