Digging into the Analogue Pocket, a portable FPGA game system

it took an entire year for it to arrive but it finally came today I'm going to take a look at the analog pocket I'll not only give you my Impressions on the device as a portable fpga based gaming system but I couldn't help but to tear it down and take a peek inside [Music] this portable fpga based gaming system has a lot of promise that it tries to live up to and it was a long time coming literally I ordered my analog pocket on September 1st 2022 and I finally got my shipping notification on August 22nd 2023 yes it took a exactly 1 year from the time that I handed analog my money before I had my pocket in hand look I know a lot of people are upset about some of analog's business practices and I totally get it there seems to be a lot of scarcity in their product line and we've been seeing some of their products appearing on online auction sites for double the retail price but today I want to set aside those discussions and take a look purely at the tech I'm going to start out by giving you an overview of the pocket along with my initial Impressions then we're going to open it up and take a look at its internals after that I'll take you through the software side of things and I'll show you how to get it set up with cores and ROMs and then I'm going to put it up against a couple of other gaming options and close out this video with some final thoughts and recommendations I have to start off by saying that the analog pocket is a beautiful piece of technology at least from the outside the casing is made from molded ABS plastic with a semi-textured finish that does feel really nice to the touch I've heard some people complaining about the quality of the plastic but I honestly don't agree it feels high quality to me and is quite sturdy it also has a good bit of heft to it when you combine the weight the semi-textured feel and the size of the device it really does feel like a high-end product and that's something else that I just don't agree with some of the other reviewers about I've seen a few people say that this device is uncomfortable to hold and play for long periods of time but I've just found that not to be true at all especially when you compare it to the unhinged Game Boy Advance SP that I did a couple of months ago which really was uncomfortable for me to play for more than 30 minutes the analog pocket just feels really good the rubber Dome buttons feel good too they have a great amount of travel and play I actually think they feel better than the buttons on the original Game Boy devices even the shoulder buttons feel decent and they're just tack switches but we'll take a look at how those work in a few minutes when we take this thing apart the other thing that we need to talk about with this device is its amazing screen I've done many screen upgrades on my other portable devices but nothing comes close to this display this gorgeous screen is 3 and 1/2 in diagonally with a 10 to9 aspect ratio which is the same as the original game boy at the end of the day the analog pocket is a perfect 10x scaling of the standard Game Boy display and inside this 3 and 1/2 in screen they packed a whopping 1,600 by 1440 pixels that gives this device a pixel density of over 600 pixels per inch this is just crazy the highest end laptop and smartphone displays come nowhere close to this resolution and when you play Game Boy games on this device you really appreciate the quality of this screen and the care that they put into replicating that Classic Game Boy [Music] experience okay enough of the outside let's open it up and see what's on the inside the back shell here is held in place with four T6 screws once you get the back cover off you'll notice that there's a j tag header here at the bottom now in in case you're not familiar with it a JTAG header can give you insight into what's happening inside the chips it's often used for debugging but it can also be used to program a Chip's internal Flash in this case if you're developing a core for the pocket you can connect your computer to the JTAG header to test and debug your core as it's running the battery is contained inside this black housing and held in place with clips and it looks fairly easy to change if you ever need to replace it now getting a closer look you can see that the battery is 4,300 milliamp hours which is quite large and this is because fpgas aren't exactly optimized for power efficiency now let's take a look at the shoulder buttons they live on a small PCB that's clipped into place so I just gently unclipped it and worked it out and you'll notice is a small ribbon cable connecting the shoulder buttons to the main board I think it feels pretty good for tack switches but if you wanted to swap these out for switches that have more or less force it looks like it would be a fairly simple operation I do like how this piece is replaceable I've had a few different devices where ta switches have gotten damaged over time to get to the main board we need to remove this plastic cover this is also held into place with clips so a little bit of gentle prying should pop it right out okay here's the back side of the main board at the top here you'll notice two speakers and it looks like they're attached to the board each with ribbon cables instead of wires so we need to disconnect both of those this ribbon cable here connects the power and volume buttons and the main board should just lift right up but we do need to be careful because the LCD is attached to the front of the PCB and wow there's a lot packed on to the front side of this board honestly I wasn't expecting it to be this densely populated the fact that they were able to fit all of this onto a PCB this small really demonstrates the amount of engineering that had to go into this device now one of the main things you'll notice is that there's not one but two fpga the big one top here is a cyclone 5 which should sound familiar if you've watched some of my videos on the mister because it's the same family of fpga used by the d10 Nano it does differ from the mis's fpga in some very important ways however which we'll take a look at in just a few minutes and this other fpga down here is a cyclone 10 now the way this works is analog is using the Cyclone 10 for core system functionality while the Cyclone 5 is used for actually running the fpga cores another thing that really stands out here and honestly really baffled me at first is the inclusion of a p 32 mx4 series microcontroller so my first reaction was why in the world are they including a microcontroller on this device when there's a cyclone 5 on board well to understand this we need to take a closer look at the two fpgas that are in this device as I said earlier there's two fpga chips a cyclone 5 and a cyclone 10 but the Cyclone 5 is a different variant than what you'll find in the Mis the Mis project uses an S Series chip which is an S so with an arm processor because there's an arm chip on board the mis's operating system runs directly on that chip but the analog pocket uses an eer Cyclone 5 and this chip does not have a processor side it's just an fpga so the P 32 is used for running the pocket's operating system and you can see that from this system architecture diagram that I found on analog site the Aristotle fpga is referring to the Cyclone 10 and the system MCU over here is referring to the P 32 okay so the Cyclone 5 is used for running the cores and is available for developers to build custom cores on top of and it's the A4 variant which means that it has 49,000 logic elements the Cyclone 10 however is the 10 c016 variant which only has 16,000 logic elements so when you compare the two fpga the one used for running cores is much more capable and I can understand why analog did this the Cyclone 5e chip retails for around $70 but the Cyclone 10 can be picked up for a meager $18 so if a secondary fpga is needed for core system functionality there's no need to make it a beefy chip that would just increase the cost of the overall system now one thing that I'm not too keen on is that analog is using the two fpgas as a marketing point on this device so someone just kind of casually observing it might think oh there's two fpga inside of here so that's got to be way better than just having one and analog goes as far as to tout this in their developer documentation listing each fpga and even pointing out that there's 15,000 logic elements in the Cyclone 10 this gives the impression that developers can use that Cyclone 10 chip but analog says that it's not user [Music] accessible at the heart of the analog pocket software is something that analog calls the analog OS now there's not a lot of information available but it seems that analog is planning to standardize the usage of this operating system across its products the analog OS has several cores built in which will play physical games that you insert into the cartridge slot out of the box it supports Game Boy and Game Boy advanced cartridges but analog also sells cartridge adapters that you can use to insert Sega Game Gear Atari Links Neo geop pocket and and turbor graphic 16 cartridges The Game Gear adapter is available now but the others are only listed for pre-order analog did optimize this system for a cartridge first experience and it really shows it feels magical when you insert a real Game Boy cartridge and the high density display lights up with a nostalgic feel and they did an amazing job emulating the experience of different Game Boy displays you can change the screen settings to imitate a Game Boy Pocket and even a Game Boy Light and it's pretty crazy how authentic these screen modes actually feel while the built-in cartridge-based experience is fantastic You could argue that it's not worth the $220 price tag especially when you can get an okay experience with a Game Boy advanced SP and a decent $50 screen upgrade looking at them side by side though there's no doubt that the analog pocket does the Game Boy experience better than the original devices and when you factor in features such as low power sleep mode and save states for cartridges even if you just want to play your Classic Game Boy cartridges it's starting to look like a pretty good investment but analog does take it a step further with an initiative that it calls open fpg a this probably wasn't the best name for them to use because there's an existing initiative online already called open fpga so if you go searching you're going to stumble across it and think that this is some larger initiative that analog is participating in but it's not this is something different the open fpga initiative that was started by analog is their attempt to establish a standard that can be used for reusable fpga cores even though these cores are only usable on the pocket right now I would assume that analog's other products could also leverage these open fpga cores in the future if you're a developer and want to create open fpga cores analog provides some decent documentation and a set of starter templates that you can use because open fpga cores can be created by anyone there's not a single repository that houses them all so you may have to hunt around a bit to find the ones that you really want one person however did put together a site that inventories several known open fpga cores into a single location now I don't know if it's exhaustive but there's currently 106 cores listed on that site once you found the cores you want installing them is super simple first you need to download the core then insert your micro SD card into your computer and then just copy the contents of the zip file onto the root of the micro SD card when you insert the card back into the pocket the core will be listed under the open fpga menu now if you don't want to have to go out and find and manually load up all the cores that you want you can use one of the community tools to load them all for you now there's a few different tools out there but there's two in particular that I've used and so let's take a look at both of those the first one is called pocket updator and you can download that from the following GitHub repository pocket updator does a good job giving you a oneclick experience to get all your cores loaded up and in addition to installing the cores pocket updator lets you organize them into different categories so you don't have to go scrolling through the whole list when you want to play them and another nice feature of pocket updator is its integration of asset image packs these provide various pieces of artwork for open fpga cores when you select them in the menu screen the other community tool that I've used is called pocket sync unlike pocket updator pocket sync is multiplatform so you can run it on Windows Mac and Linux pocket syn has a very polished look and also has a couple of features that pocket updator doesn't have for one thing pocket Sync has the ability to browse and manage the save states for your games now there's not a lot that you can do here but it's useful to be able to see them and have the option of deleting them if you need to free up some storage pocket sync also gives you a game loader view that lists each core and the number of games that you have for that core and and if you click on one of the tiles it opens up directly to the folder that you need to drag and drop your ROM files into which is very helpful in loading them up but there's one other killer feature of pocket sync that's worth calling out you can synchronize your cartridge level saves between the analog pocket and the mister yeah this is very cool this means that you can play a game on the pocket and then transfer the saved game over to the Mis to continue playing it on the big screen now it's important to note that this only works with the native save functionality that the games have built in you can't do this with the saved States feature in the pocket but it's still very cool okay once you have your cores installed the next thing to do is to load up your ROM files for this you'll want to use the assets folder each system has a dedicated folder under assets and within that folder folder is another folder called common the common folder is where you want to copy your ROM files into because it's the default location that the cores used to find those files now if you happen to have two different cores installed for the same system you'll see a number on the right side of the core list so here for example I have two different NES cores installed I can select the change core option and switch between them but regardless of which cores are installed they'll look to that common folder for the ROMs so you only need to have one copy of your ROMs on the card so far I've spent a decent amount of time playing about a dozen different handheld and console cores as well as a few different arcade cores and as far as I can tell they all perform as you'd expect them to in particular the Game Boy and Game Boy Color cores feel the best out of all of them them and it's no surprise the device is very Game Boy like so after a while you forget that you're playing with Hardware emulation I think a large part of this is that these games fill the entire screen and that makes the experience much more immersive now I traveled to Europe for a business trip last week and during the flight I played Game Boy games on the analog pocket for hours other cores play great as well but they don't all offer the same feature set for example the SNES core feels really accurate but it lacks the ability to save State and according to the GitHub repo there aren't any plans to add this feature either but I'd prefer to use a core that supports save states over one that [Music] doesn't next I want to compare comp the analog pocket to a couple of other devices the first one that I want to put it up against is none other than the Mis now this really isn't a fair comparison the mister and the analog pocket are two different devices for two different scenarios and really the only thing they have in common is that they're both fpga based game systems but many fpga enthusiasts are looking at one of these two systems to purchase so there's still value in comparing them first and foremost of course is the form factor of these systems the mister is intended to be powered externally and plugged into an external monitor with external inputs and the analog pocket is intended to run from a battery with its built-in display and built-in inputs and this is perhaps the most obvious difference between the two and this also has a bunch of implications for one thing an fpga that's optimized to run on battery isn't going to be as versatile as an fpga that isn't optimized for power efficiency and when you compare the Mr Cyclone 5 S Series fpga to the pockets Cyclone 5 eer fpga you can see the difference as I mentioned earlier the mis's fpga is an S so with an arm processor embedded and the fpga side has 110,000 logic elements the pockets fpga however is just an fpga and it only contains 49,000 logic elements and this makes a big difference when it comes to the types of systems that it can emulate because of this many fifth generation consoles such as the PlayStation and Sega Saturn won't be possible on the analog pocket though they work great on the Mis another notable difference between the mister and the analog pocket is the input processing on the analog pocket controller input uses a polling mechanism as I've discussed in some of my previous videos on controller input latency polling will always carry a risk of input lag the mister on the other hand has a direct input mechanism through the snack interface which isn't pulling based this doesn't mean that the pockets controls are poor and laggy though they're not I've been using my pocket quite a bit and there hasn't yet been a situation where I felt like the analog Pockets controls had lagged behind it is worthwhile noting however that the mister does offer some better input options I'd also be remiss to not call out that the mis's operating system is open source while the analog OS isn't because of this we get pretty regular updates to the mister to address bug fixes and feature enhancements from the community the analog OS however hasn't really seen an update for about 5 months now the last major difference that I want to call out here is price the analog pocket is retailing for $220 and that gets you a fully playable system the mister however will cost you somewhere around $400 for just a basic setup and that doesn't include any controllers or a display and you can easily spend more with the Mis by purchasing accessories snack adapters and other add-ons all that said if you want an analog pocket you're probably going to have to wait for a while analog seems to be perpetually out of stock on all their units and as I mentioned earlier my order took a full year to arrive the mis's de10 Nano board is also sometimes difficult to find but backorders get fulfilled in weeks not years and at the time that I'm filming this video Mouser has hundreds available for sale right now okay so that's the lay of the land when comparing the analog pocket to the mister but what about the scenario where you're comparing it to another handheld gaming system in particular I want to put it up against the Game Boy Advance SP unhinged now I built one of these devices a couple of months ago using boxy pixels aluminum kit and really L the device but is the analog pocket a better option before jumping into that discussion we first need to get one thing out of the way the GBA SP unhinged will only natively play Game Boy Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games as I mentioned earlier these systems are all supported on the analog pocket as well but the pocket also supports other system systems out of the box that the Game Boy Advance doesn't so if you're looking for more than just Game Boy games then the analog pocket is the clear winner there but let's just set that aside for a minute and talk specifically about the Game Boy gaming aspect now the unhinged does have a nice size screen with a clear IPS display that's a step up from the Native Game Boy Advance SP screen when you put it side by side with the analog Pockets display it actually looks pretty similar even though the analog pocket has a much higher resolution but you can see a big difference when you play original Game Boy cartridges the game fills the entire display on the pocket while it feels like the size of a postage stamp on the unhinged in terms of form factor the unhinged is a bit smaller and more portable than the pocket you may struggle to fit the analog pocket into your actual pocket but I don't think you'll have that challenge with the unhinged but one thing to keep in mind is that if you use a Game Boy cartridge inside the GBA SP unhinged a significant portion will stick out from the bottom and that makes the overall unit bigger and more difficult to hold while you're playing it and speaking of comfort something that I brought up in my review of the unhinged is how I could really only hold it comfortably for about 30 minutes while playing it now this was because of the weight combined with the sharp edges of the aluminum case pressing into my skin I don't have this problem with the analog pocket even though the device is bigger it doesn't feel any heavier and it's quite comfortable to hold for many hours and believe it or not the price of both of these units is about the same the unhinged GBA cost $29 for all the parts and if you don't already own a Game Boy Advance SP that you can modify then the analog pocket will actually be cheaper so while I really do love the Game Boy Advance SP unhinged the analog pocket is a better value for the money and it provides a better experience if you're just looking for a good portable device to play Classic Game Boy games on the analog pocket has a lot going for it and I don't regret the purchase decision at all and to be honest in the past month or so since I've had it I've actually been playing it a lot more than I've been playing my mister now some of this is because I've been traveling and have been able to take it with me but even if I wasn't it's just convenient to pick it up and play it or to spend a few minutes playing it in bed at night before I fall asleep in terms of playability I do disagree with some of the critical reviews I've seen about this device being uncomfortable to hold as I mentioned earlier it has been one of the more comfortable portable gaming devices that I own what I don't love however is some of analog's business practices around this device not just the pocket but many of their devices and accessories seem to be always out of stock and as I mentioned at the beginning of this video it took a full year from the time I placed the order for my analog pocket until it arrived at my door there aren't that many products that I would have that much patience waiting for and to be honest the only reason why I was able to wait that long for the pocket was because I forgot that I bought it but all that said it's a neat device and I'm glad it exists should you buy one well that's up to you I will say that if I was just now hearing about the analog pocket for their first time today I'd still buy by [Music] one well thanks for taking a look at the analog pocket with me today I hope you enjoyed this video and perhaps it answered some of your questions on this device post any thoughts that you have in the comments below and also feel free to ask any other questions I'd be happy to answer them as best as I can all right well that's it for today's episode hey thanks for watching and until next time go make something cool [Music]

Channel: What's Ken Making

Views: 80,771

Keywords: fpga, analogue, pocket, mister, gaming, retro

Id: D2SVSOkwXlc

Length: 29min 43sec (1783 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2023