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Analogue’s 4K Nintendo 64 launches next year for $249 (www.theverge.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I have a love hate with analogue. They undoubtedly make really excellent products, and I absolutely adore my pocket. However they really lean into the fomo of their stuff. They make very few units, and you have to be ready to go when they drop more product most of the time. I will say though the price of this is a lot lower than I expected. And while you shouldn't count on it, every analogue system has gotten some form of ability to play roms from other systems (whether it's built into the OS (not happening for the 3D) or a "jailbreak" is released by basically an employee of analogue).

Analogue stuff is good if you have cartridges you want to play, but at this point, with the recent release of Taki Udon's cheap Mister Pi (https://retroremake.co/pages/store), I think Mister is the way to go. It's an open source project as opposed to analogue's implementation. The issue with Mister was you needed a pretty expensive DE10 Nano board to utilize it. Now you can get one of these new boards for only $100 (if you can get your hands on them. Only 2 batches have been sold so far and they sell out quick). Plus Taki is planning on using this new board to make a handheld Mister which I'm super stoked for.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I can't fault them for not making such a niche product at a large enough scale to make them readily available and cheap. I know we've become accustomed to that from other larger companies, but for a small company, that's either very risky or just not an option. So they just design cool stuff, make just enough so that they know they can safely sell them all and thus make a predictable ROI, and move onto the next cool thing. No pressure for growth or satisfying every potential customer. Sounds like the dream.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

That's super fair and I agree for the most part. Though it's hard to be super enthusiastic about it when they focus on a plethora of super limited edition color ways for the pocket instead of keeping the base one in stock and completely abandoning DAC support which they promised a while ago (and recently scrubbed all mention of on their site)

[–] turtletracks 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

How's this allowed? Sick, though

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago

Why shouldn't it be allowed? The company does not violate any copyright, trademark or patent. Otherwise Nintendo would have sued them for their similar project, but for Game Boy, the Analogue Pocket.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Same reason emulators are allowed. As long as the emulator doesn't use Nintendo's literal software/hardware or schematics, and as long as the emulator doesn't traffic in illegal file-sharing, it is allowed. Or at least, it exists in a legal grey area. And Analogue's pitch is original hardware, essentially rebuilt from scratch using FPGA technology. You still need actual Nintendo 64 carts to use this device. Or at least, that is how it is marketed.

I think the recent emulator shutdowns by Nintendo were more about software piracy. The devs knew that their emulators were being used to play unreleased Nintendo games. The emulators themselves may have been safe and legal, but the devs are mostly just volunteers, or small time operations running on a patreon. As soon as Nintendo applied even the smallest amount of pressure, the devs caved, because they don't want to spend their entire life savings and then some trying to defend software piracy on principle. Me thinks that Analogue would actually put up a fight if Nintendo tried anything, and that's why Nintendo doesn't try anything.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Agreed. I also want to add that this is not a mass market product, plus its not current gen either. So Nintendo does probably not care at all, in addition to what you already said.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I think they probably do care, but they just haven't got around to strong-arming them yet. There's still more emulator devs to harass after all.

[–] Dudewitbow 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

as long as analogue didnt use the devices actual hardware design and code, its completely legal. theyre not selling you games, theyre selling you a piece of hardware capable of playing said games with their own hardware design.

i dont want to say emulation in a soft sense because its not software emulation, its hardware to hardware emulatoion.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

This is actually advertised as having no emulation, all FPGA. Idk if those are compatible but they also say the n64 was the first multiplayer console in the header so they’re clearly a little sketchy on the details lol

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

FPGAs would be considered “hardware emulation” but a lot of people don’t like that term, and think emulation should be a term limited to software.

Like, there aren’t real N64 chips in there. The hardware IS emulating an N64 - it’s just not doing so in a way that’s comparable with software emulation at all.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

That’s silly, thank you for the explanation!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Analogue likely doesn't emulate the hardware at the transistor level, as it's far more difficult than doing what most software emulators do.

From an interesting (altough non-conclusive) HN-thread [1].

Without seeing the code, it's impossible to know where Analog's implementation falls on the spectrum of software emulation vs hardware simulation. There is nothing magical about FPGAs that automatically makes anything developed with them a 1:1 representation of real hardware. In fact, there are plenty of instances where the FPGA version of a particular console is literally just a representation of a popular emulator only in verilog/vhdl. In many instances, even the best FPGA implementations of some systems are still only simulating system level behavior. Off the top of my head, one famously difficult case is audio, where many chips have analog circuitry that cannot be fully simulated.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37901381

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Damn I wish they would sell in Europe directly. Ordering anything from Analogue would have ridiculous shipping costs and customs duty so I never got around to ordering the Pocket either. I know there are cheaper options especially for game boy hardware but Analogues is just so sexy.