Analogue Pocket review – a heaven-sent gift for Game Boy fans

This high-end reproduction console makes original Game Boy titles (and more) look and play better than ever

For the past 10 years Seattle-based tech company Analogue has been making high-end retro video game hardware, with a steely focus on accurate, authentic reproduction rather than emulation. Its Mega Sg and Super Nt consoles were highly acclaimed modernisations of the Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo, allowing users to play all their old 16-bit game carts on modern machines with a variety of display and audio options. Now the company has finally launched its Analogue Pocket, a handheld console that will play Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance (GBA) cartridges on a beautiful 3.5in LCD display in crisp 1600×1440 resolution.

As with the other consoles in its range, there’s no software emulation of the old systems going on here. The company uses a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) circuit to replicate the original tech specs, which means it can pretty much run any Game Boy game from the thousands available, with few of the glitches, instabilities or compatibility problems often associated with software-based emulators.

The gaming equivalent of buying a fancy new turntable to play your old records

The Analogue Pocket is available for pre-order now; $219.99

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Steam Deck: is it the Nintendo Switch for nerds?

Valve’s newly announced handheld console promises to put the latest PC games in your pocket. But do they belong there?

It looks like Valve has done it again. The company that surprised everyone by pivoting from game developer to digital shopkeeper with the launch of Steam, then leapt into virtual reality with the HTC Vive and Valve Index headsets, is now taking on Nintendo with a powerful handheld games console.

Announced on 16 July and due to launch in December, the Steam Deck features a 7in LCD touchscreen, an array of analogue and touch-pad controls, a gyroscope for motion detection, wifi connectivity and a base station so it can be hooked up to a monitor. Tech-wise, it’s built around a custom Zen 2 AMD processor, AMD RDNA 2 GPU and 16GB of memory. In a recent deep dive on the machine’s specs, Eurogamer found it compared to the Xbox Series S console in terms of performance.

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