by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Analogue Pocket
• $220 for the Pocket, $100 for the Dock
• Plays original GameBoy, Color, and Advance carts. Additional adaptors allow you to play Game Gear carts and (ostensibly) Lynx and Neo Geo Pocket in the future

After a long period of big promises, delays and drama, the Analogue Pocket is finally here. An HD, portable solution for playing GameBoy games (and possibly more), the console seems to have made big waves in the retro scenes. On paper, it seems like everything you’d want out a modern GameBoy, and more. But how does it hold up as an actual portable, meant for everyday use? After four months with the Pocket, I’m here to tell you what the Analogue Pocket experience does, and doesn’t deliver, with some comparisons to other devices before the final verdict. 

Before we start, let’s go over what the Pocket promises, and what my expectations were for it. 

Going from Analogue’s own site, the Pocket supports Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advance games, as well as the Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket and Atari Lynx in a high definition display. It’s features display modes that imitate the original hardware, save states, sleep and wake functions, multiplayer with the Pocket and original Gameboy hardware, on board Nanoloop music tracker software and support for GB Studio homebrew titles, optional external dock support, and more with the upcoming Analogue OS updates. Sounds good. 

As for my own expectations, I want my portables to be something I slip into a jacket or pants pocket, pick and put down at a moment’s notice, and fit into spaces during my commute or downtime. For context, my commute is over an hour each way, with plenty of time between stops to sneak in a quick game. 

Before I even got to the hardware the Pocket was off to a bad start. Opening up the optional (30USD) clear case, I nearly broke the tabs immediately because I put it together the wrong way. The small pegs on the bottom half clearly slot into the holes on the back of the Pocket, but what I didn’t realize is that the top half also only goes in one way, and putting it on wrong caused the tabs to catch unpleasantly, giving me anxiety for the next ten minutes as I attempted to remove the Pocket without breaking the case. To be fair, I probably would have known all this if I’d read the included manual first, but what kind of case requires a manual to operate?

I bring this up because it kind of reflects Analogue’s approach to hardware. The whole package feels designed by people who design hardware to be displayed, not directly interacted with. The Pocket itself has a sleek, minimalist design that’s popular with tech geeks and modders, imitating the original Gameboy hardware, but jettisoning the welcoming, toy-like curves for sharp, crisp edges in a monochrome color scheme.The shoulder buttons a bit higher than halfway on the back, next to the cartridge slot. It splits the difference between an original DMG and the SP, not unlike the unhinged GBA SP mod. 

What it doesn’t take from the SP is the location of the cartridge slot, opting for the original Gameboy cartridge placement, which immediately causes problems. This compromise turns the already cramped layout of the SP more uncomfortable. With the SP you can mitigate this by hitting the shoulder buttons with the inside of your knuckle, but here the cartridge blocks that and causes your fingers to rest on the cartridge while playing. To keep the shoulder buttons accessible, the cartridge slot is left more exposed, which holds fine for GBA carts but leaves Gameboy and Gameboy Color carts loose and easily jostled with a light tap. Which seems like a good way to lose save data. 

It ends up being a worse solution than both the original Gameboy and SP form factors, breaking compatibility with games like Boktai, where it blocks the solar sensor. Unfortunately, that’s probably also the only way they were going to be able to get cartridge adaptors for other systems positioned reasonably, which were going to look ugly no matter what. 

With such weird, compromised hardware, it shouldn’t be a surprise that games on the Analogue reflect that. 

My first run at the device was with a GBA flashcart, which I’d been playing mostly through my DS. Like the DS, the mismatched resolution means dealing with a letterboxed image, but GBA games appear bright and crisp otherwise. The aforementioned hardware issues immediately get in the way, especially for games that make heavy use of the shoulder buttons (MMZ), though the option to mirror the shoulder buttons on the upper face buttons somewhat mitigates it. 

What really causes problems are the subtle incompatibilities with flashcarts. Flashcarts are a popular method for anyone wanting to play original hardware, since you don’t need to deal with carrying a load of carts, or pay exorbitant prices to check out a system’s library. Officially, the Analogue doesn’t support loading ROMs either (we’ll get back to that one), so you’ll likely want one. 

Even after several updates, some users are still reporting flashcarts not working entirely, which I’ve luckily avoided. Either way, using a flashcart will lock you out of the system’s save state and sleep functions, which is a big hit to the Analogue Pocket’s portability, but wouldn’t be a big problem if they didn’t cause the flashcart’s own sleep and save state functions to malfunction. 

Something about the way Analogue handles the cart has caused problems when returning to original hardware, including data being erased entirely, and save states made on one device being incompatible with the other.

On the subject of save states, the Analogue nominally supports them on a system wide basis, but as of writing, months into the device’s release, you can only write a singular save across ALL games. Creating a save in one game will erase your save in the other. For GBA games this isn’t much of a problem, but it becomes a problem for GameBoy and Color games, which often either used passwords to save progress, or had no way to save at all. 

Eventually, I was able to dig out one of the Gameboy carts I did have, which finally made the system make sense. The crisp, full screen display, alternative screen modes, and even the awkward button layout all fell into place when playing, and having sleep mode y'know, actually work, made it a much better fit for portable play. As a premium upgrade to the original GameBoy and GameBoy Color, the Analogue Pocket finally made sense, and even competes with modern options for modded hardware. 

Well, for a little while.  Like almost everything on this system, the more I played it the more details fell out of place. The power and volume buttons immediately became a problem on my commute. The original GameBoy models all use either a volume wheel or slider, with satisfying action that let you intuitively understand where you are on the volume scale, and what the maximum and minimum are. The Analogue Pocket uses ovaloid buttons, with the split volume button doing double duty, allowing you to also adjust brightness or mute the system by pressing both halves at once. 

The size and shape of the button makes them both easy to mistake for each other, and hard to hit a specific button. I needed to use a fingernail to adjust volume, and I found myself constantly turning the system to make sure I was hitting the correct button, so I wouldn’t accidentally mute it, or put it into sleep mode. 

The on-screen display also only shows if you’re going up, down, or have reached the minimum or maximum, with no indication of where you are on the scale, all displayed in white text with no outline. You might be able to guess why that could be a problem on a system designed for playing black and white games. 

Sleep mode’s implementation is remarkably inconsistent, too. A short tap of the power button will put the system into sleep mode, but only if you’re playing an original cart or GB Studio game. On flashcart it’ll prompt you to power off the system entirely, and when on the menu, without a game loaded, sleep mode is disabled entirely. It’s way too contextual, going against muscle memory for a button that’s had a consistent function across almost every device for decades. At least a long press will always turn off the system. 

Issues like this go on and on–there’s only a few preset color schemes, with no way to mix them with the screen filters, and no custom color scheme support yet, giving you less options than an original GameBoy Color. Buttons can’t be remapped, with only an option for a SNES style layout that switches the main controls to Y and B, mimicking the Super GameBoy’s alternate control scheme. This outright replaced the option to mirror the buttons to the shoulders button, which came with the original firmware. No idea why it couldn’t keep both. . And no, there isn’t support for Super GameBoy color palettes or borders, if you’re wondering. 

What’s bewildering about these issues is they’re all issues that have been solved on emulators, FPGA solutions like the MiSTer and handhelds that cost half of what the Analogue goes for. They’re basic features I basically expect out of both hardware and software. 

The extra features it touts would theoretically go some way to make up the gap, but all these are equally half baked or MIA. Community developed cores, which would allow it to play other systems (somehow, without playing ROMS), don’t even have an option in menu, with no mention or news on them outside the initial announcement.

There’s no hint of an unofficial jailbreak, which usually releases within a week of Analogue devices, providing at least the ability to play ROMs. Nor is there any sign of the Analogue OS, which promises the ability to save screenshots, have multiple save states, and organize playlists of your favorite games (again, somehow, without playing ROMs).

The only cartridge adaptor available now is Game Gear adaptor, with nothing on the promised Lynx and Neo Geo Pocket adaptors, and reports that the Game Gear one might even be damaging the labels on carts. 

GB Studio support is less than impressive, thanks to it requiring the proprietary .pocket format, which only GB Studio 3 can export to, causing compatibility with the majority of homebrew software made with GB Studio, which were primarily made with older versions. To be fair, this is a software issue out of Analogue’s control, and the community have developed branches of previous GB Studio programs that can export to the new format. Of course, this would also be solved if the Analogue Pocket just played ROMs. 

Ironically, GB Studio support has been getting a lot of use–as a workaround to play GameBoy and GameBoy Color ROMs. A lot of people speculated that the proprietary format the system uses was just a wrapper for GameBoy ROMs, so Analogue could continue to claim the system doesn’t play ROMs. That seems to be at least partially true, with IPS patches coming out that allow you to convert GameBoy, GameBoy Color, and even more ironically, GB Studio games, to a format the Analogue Pocket can play. 

This has, at the very least, allowed me to play the majority of GameBoy titles I’d wanted to play on original hardware, letting me discover new favorites and kept me from dropping even more on a GameBoy flashcart to play the titles I couldn’t on my GBA cart. It’s definitely an added bonus, though this has all been thanks to community efforts, so I can’t exactly give Analogue any credit for it. 

And even after all that, with how many disappointments the Pocket lays on, the Dock might even be more disappointing. The Dock has thankfully been updated with the ability to update straight from the Pocket, use original screen filters, resize the screen, and adjust saturation, all of which it launched without.. That said, controller support is still limited, and the link cable port is blocked when docked, since they placed it on the bottom. It doesn’t have the promised CRT output via the Analogue DAC, making it neither analog nor pocketable. 

Compared to the care taken with displaying GameBoy and GameBoy Color games on the Pocket, the Dock feels like an afterthought whose purpose is primarily to offload the cost of Bluetooth and USB-C display out to another device. Sure, compared to the cost of niche solutions like the GBA Consolizer it comes out well ahead, but if you don’t care about continuing progress from the same cart, suddenly you have plenty of better options. 

If you’re married to the benefits of FPGA devices, a fully kitted out MiSTer costs less than the price of the Pocket, the two flashcarts, and dock you’d need to play the Gameboys’ libraries, and gets you tons of options for screen modes, filters, color palettes, controllers, analog video, Super Gameboy palette and border support, working save states and even 2 player local play, on the same or separate screens, for all generations of GameBoys, on top of tons of consoles, handhelds, arcade boards and old PCs made before the Playstation generation.

If it has to be a handheld, portable emulators are rapidly improving, and for the same price as the Pocket itself, or even less, you can find a handheld capable of running the most accurate Gameboy emulators, with low latency and HDMI output, and support for everything up to the Dreamcast, as long as you’re willing to do a little work. 

And if you’re willing to really work for it, well you can probably play everything the Pocket does on the very device you’re reading this on. If you’re accepting a compromise already, why not accept a compromise that gets you more? 

To justify itself in such a crowded space, the Analogue Pocket needed to do a single thing better than anything else. Its high resolution, perfectly integer scaled, backlit screen almost accomplishes this for the GameBoy and GameBoy Color, but in the process strips the experience of the charm and portability of the original systems, while compromising every other feature it promises. I set my Analogue Pocket in plain view every day, ready to be packed up and played on my commute, but I found myself increasingly picking up other systems instead. The 3DS XL, my emulation handhelds, the even more clunky Switch, and even the original, non backlit GameBoys–each of them provided a more compelling experience than the Pocket, and fit better into my lifestyle. 

The Analogue Pocket is a system that asked me to change my routine to fit its design, rather than being designed to fit into my routine. It’s a beautiful, over engineered device that feels like an unfinished first draft for a revision that’ll never come. It’s a fantastic display piece, but if you want to actually play the games, you’ve got better options.