Analogue introduces its Analogue OS for the upcoming Pocket handheld device

analogue.png

Analogue's latest FPGA system is almost here, after two years of waiting. With the handheld Analogue Pocket's imminent launch this December, Analogue took some time to showcase a new tidbit about the handheld device. Rather than just use a simple menu like the MegaSg or SuperNt, the Pocket will be running its own custom operating system, aptly named Analogue OS. It comes with a number of features, including allowing you to filter your games by developer or publisher, region, revisions, and more. Analogue OS will also let users add custom boxart or title screen images for your whole library, make custom playlists of games, capture screenshots, provide statistics of your general gameplay, and save or load savestates.

And this is all done on official cartridges--not through emulation. In an interview with Polygon, Christopher Taber, one of Analogue's developers claimed, "It is more than just being complex but dually difficult to do this reliably, let alone on physical cartridges. As far as I know we’re the first to ever develop the technology to capture and load save states instantly during gameplay on physical cartridges."

Analogue OS will be available on the Pocket and Duo systems. Currently, there are no plans to put the new OS on any of their previous hardware. On launch, it'll support features for Game Boy, Color, Advance, and Game Gear, with future updates planned for Neo Geo Pocket Color, TurboGrafix16, and Atari Lynx games. In addition, the gameplay tracking, library sorting, and savestate capabilities will not be ready for the initial release of Analogue OS 1.0--they're planned to be added in version 1.1, whenever that releases.

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RAHelllord

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I don't know why they're hyping it up when they have no stock. Let me order oneeeeeeeeeeee
They're hyping it up because they have no stock, can't risk people cancelling their preorders after a year and buying something else.

Not that there's much else to buy with the chip shortages but still.
 

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MISTer Project Intensifies

Except, y'know. Under the guise of "preservation" despite commercial "preservation" outside of accessibility being a farce LOL
All this talk about "more cores" yet no way to run anything on said cores. Do they expect me to buy a portable CD reader to play Saturn or PSOne games? IF that ever comes to the Pocket, let alone SNES & Genesis?
 
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Xzi

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Save states are nice I guess, but the only way a device like this would have any appeal for me is if it allows you to rip/backup physical games by default. Pretty hard to justify double the price of original hardware (GBA/SP) otherwise.
 
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diggeloid

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Sounds awesome! If I ever manage to get my hands on this thing, I'll maybe finally get into FPGA development.

I wonder what the point of the library is though, if you're supposed to play with cartridges. Does it allow you to dump and store ROMs?
 

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Does this thing play roms or just carts?
Just carts.

BUT if current tradition of Analogue products continues, there could be a "Jailbroken" firmware for this that will allow you to dump carts... eventually. Hopefully.

Cuz I have a bootleg copy of Mario Party Advance I got for Christmas years ago that is prone to losing the save from impact (already happened TWICE), and I do NOT want to lose my old save of almost completion in single-player and no tool I know of & tried has been able to dump the save. Always ends in a blank file.
 
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Hanafuda

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Does this thing play roms or just carts?
Just carts.

BUT if current tradition of Analogue products continues, there could be a "Jailbroken" firmware for this that will allow you to dump carts... eventually. Hopefully.

Yeah should be good with flash carts out-of-the-box, and assuming there's a jailbreak firmware it'll probably do all those other nifty things. The SuperNT will play all the SNES catalog except the expansion chip games (SD2SNES/FXPakPro now plays all of those that matter).

I'm glad Analogue is finally getting the Pocket to market. I'm not interested this time around (I do have the Super NT), but maybe now they can get working on a refresh of the NT Mini ... skip the expensive aluminum shell and keep it under $200 this time, guys!
 

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Except, y'know. Under the guise of "preservation" despite commercial "preservation" outside of accessibility being a farce LOL
All this talk about "more cores" yet no way to run anything on said cores. Do they expect me to buy a portable CD reader to play Saturn or PSOne games? IF that ever comes to the Pocket, let alone SNES & Genesis?

There's been zero word of any truly home consoles coming to the Pocket officially. I would not expect a jailbreak to bring them either. Its possible community will port some stuff from misterfpga but so far it sounds like only the smaller Cyclone X? will be open to the community? Which didn't seem like it could get much beyond gameboy color.

There's the catch that they did announce TGX16/PCE based on the Turbo Express. But this comes down to the practicality of creating a hucard adapter. You can point to the Sega Nomad but any cart adapter would be unwieldy by compare, so I think its unlikely.
 

vaugerbird

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I completely forgot that this was a thing, but I'm interested to see how it'll turn out. The premise is pretty cool, but I honestly think at the price it's at it could maybe include ROM backup, or better yet ROM export. I know it's wishful thinking though...
 

Nagarjuna

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Analogue is fucking wack. Their products just feel like over-priced designer versions of retro consoles. They certainly look good, and have interesting features, but they wall everything behind their proprietary garden and are deathly afraid of the possibility of the end-user playing games obtained illegally on their systems.
They're essentially the Apple of retro-gaming.
 

RAHelllord

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Just carts.

BUT if current tradition of Analogue products continues, there could be a "Jailbroken" firmware for this that will allow you to dump carts... eventually. Hopefully.

Cuz I have a bootleg copy of Mario Party Advance I got for Christmas years ago that is prone to losing the save from impact (already happened TWICE), and I do NOT want to lose my old save of almost completion in single-player and no tool I know of & tried has been able to dump the save. Always ends in a blank file.
Have you tried the GBxCart RW yet? That thing supports basically any bootleg cart under the sun by now and if it doesn't support yours Alex (the creator) would most likely be able to add support in a day or two if you help with giving him a couple photos and some dump results of the thing.
Dude made a patch for me on a flash cart I bought from him where I was the first and only person to encounter an obscure glitch in a game the cart wasn't made to support and had it patched within 48h of me reporting it.
 

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Have you tried the GBxCart RW yet? That thing supports basically any bootleg cart under the sun by now and if it doesn't support yours Alex (the creator) would most likely be able to add support in a day or two if you help with giving him a couple photos and some dump results of the thing.
Dude made a patch for me on a flash cart I bought from him where I was the first and only person to encounter an obscure glitch in a game the cart wasn't made to support and had it patched within 48h of me reporting it.
Even better, Lesserkuma makes his own app that's updated much more frequently for the GBxCart RW called FlashGBX. It has it's own CFW for the hardware, and whenever I have a repro cartridge that isn't detected properly or supported, he's quick to add the cart's support in an update. I use his app exclusively over Alex's.
(And Alex's apps are fragmented between 3 different apps. One to backup saves and ROMs, one to flash ROMs, and one for updating firmware.)

FlashGBX.png






I don't regret my GBxCart purchase one tiny bit, as you can see from the picture below it's been very profitable for me over these past few months!

profits.png
 
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tech3475

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I’m wondering how long before you can actually buy one? I’m interested in this as a replacement for my portable consoles, especially the Game Gear.

I completely forgot that this was a thing, but I'm interested to see how it'll turn out. The premise is pretty cool, but I honestly think at the price it's at it could maybe include ROM backup, or better yet ROM export. I know it's wishful thinking though...

I’d usually put that down to legal concerns.
 

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MISTer Project Intensifies

Except, y'know. Under the guise of "preservation" despite commercial "preservation" outside of accessibility being a farce LOL
All this talk about "more cores" yet no way to run anything on said cores. Do they expect me to buy a portable CD reader to play Saturn or PSOne games? IF that ever comes to the Pocket, let alone SNES & Genesis?

There isn't a Saturn or PS1 core coming to the pocket... if it would I'd get that it would require extra hardware though, unlike everything else that could be run since all their products contain the same FPGA. I think the OS is a nice feature as well as save states and nanoloop, also think they make great designs. Still not gonna get it, if it was unlocked to run all cores I'd get it right away, I think they will release such a system once they've gone through selling everything as a single system first.
 

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I completely forgot that this was a thing, but I'm interested to see how it'll turn out. The premise is pretty cool, but I honestly think at the price it's at it could maybe include ROM backup, or better yet ROM export. I know it's wishful thinking though...

Their systems so far have all been "jailbroken" to run ROMs, they just wont sell the systems like that and instead choose to pretend someone outside the project is the one releasing the jailbreaks. No guarantee with this one, but looking at the OS database it's prepared to "Play game"... and atm it tells you to then insert the cartridge which just seems so utterly stupid that it almost has to be intended to run the ROM on a "jailbroken" system.

Just note it most likely won't run anything besides what the stock can run as cartridges... if it was truly jailbroken it would run all cores without the need for adapters and I'd buy one immediately.
 

RAHelllord

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Their systems so far have all been "jailbroken" to run ROMs, they just wont sell the systems like that and instead choose to pretend someone outside the project is the one releasing the jailbreaks. No guarantee with this one, but looking at the OS database it's prepared to "Play game"... and atm it tells you to then insert the cartridge which just seems so utterly stupid that it almost has to be intended to run the ROM on a "jailbroken" system.

Just note it most likely won't run anything besides what the stock can run as cartridges... if it was truly jailbroken it would run all cores without the need for adapters and I'd buy one immediately.
The library function is for bragging purposes when taking the console with you somewhere, like on a convention. Instead of just flexing with a photo you can now simply whip out your luxury GB and scroll through your entire library there.

Sarcasm aside, it's probably a tie-in so you can manage savestates and similar directly on the device without either having to take out the microSD card or inserting the relevant game, while 16gb are the norm a bunch of people are probably going to be using smaller 1 or 2GB cards with it so this should come in handy.
 

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