The Analogue Pocket, a sleek handheld for your retro Game Boy cartridges, will be available for pre-order on August 3 at 8am PT for $199.99, to begin shipping May 2021.
Analogue's latest retro console, which plays actual cartridges but with updated hardware (and no emulation), will be able to take any of the 3,000 or so Game Boy, Game Boy Color or Game Boy Advance cartridges that you may still have rattling around in a drawer.
The difference between playing them on your original handhelds is, for one, the battery life is upped to 10 hours of gameplay, so no more carrying around 10lbs of AA batteries. They'll also now be rendered on a sharp 3.5-inch 1600x1440 LCD, giving you more than 10x the resolution of your original Game Boy screen. Of course, the art is still that chunky pixel style but it's just...sharper. They also have settings for their original displays, to give that lovely green hue if you're a Game Boy absolutist.
Pocket has a new feature called Original Display Modes. Transform Pocket's display into the display on an original GB, GBC, or GBA. Quirks and all. Pocket's 615ppi display allows astonishingly accurate recreation of original hardware display characteristics. pic.twitter.com/1O8ZupAdIh
— Analogue (@analogue) July 27, 2020
You can also purchase cartridge adapters to let you play Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket and Atari Lynx games, too. The retro hardware masters have also cornered the only other market for owners of Game Boys right now, and that is chiptune musicians.
The Analogue Pocket is also a portable Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) with Nanoloop built in, giving you access to a synthesizer and sequencer for creating and performing music.
You can also connect it to your Mac, PC, MIDI instruments or even a TV with the purchased extra Dock, which acts exactly like a Switch or (before the Switch existed) the SNES' Super Game Boy cartridge. You can then play with any paired 8BitDo controller. For multiplayer you can connect Analogue Pockets together with link cables. Man, the nostalgia is very strong with this one.
If that's set your retro heart ablaze, you can pre-order the Analogue Pocket in Black or White for $199.99 on August 3 at 8am PT, through the Analogue Store. You can only buy two per order, though, leave some for the rest of us rose-glasses-wearers.
