The Analogue Pocket, for the unfamiliar, is a premium-grade (i.e. quite pricy) retro gaming handheld, fashioned in a similar mould to Nintendo's classic Game Boy (i.e. it's a vertical handheld) and featuring four face buttons (plus Start, Select and a Menu) button and two shoulder buttons. It features a cartridge slot that takes Game Boy, Game Boy Colour and Game Boy Advance cartridges, and can play these right out of the box. With optional adapters (which appear to be perpetually out of stock) you can also play Game Gear, NeoGeo Pocket Colour, Atari Lynx and PC Engine/Turbografx-16.

Analogue Pocket has a couple of distinctive selling points. The first of these is its inordinately high-resolution (1600×1440) screen, which you might think is the last thing you need for retro games, but in fact it makes its benefits very clear almost immediately by accurately simulating the classic displays of the aforementioned handhelds — including the distinctive "dot matrix" look of the original Game Boy, the visible scanlines of the Game Gear and Lynx, and the "grid" pattern of the original Game Boy Colour screen. You can turn this feature off if you want, but it's implemented so well that it really does recapture the feeling of using the classic systems.

The second is that it is not a cheapo emulator handheld like the stuff from companies like Anbernic. It's an FPGA device, which means it emulates systems on a hardware level rather than simulating them in software. This, in theory, leads to much more accurate recreations of how the various systems work. Cores for the systems that take the aforementioned cartridges are built in to the Pocket, but the latest firmware updates allow you to install "openFPGA" cores on there, too, and these can be used with ROM files as well as original media. The openFPGA cores also cover consoles and computers as well as handhelds, allowing you to turn the Pocket into a portable powerhouse if you so desire — particularly if you pair it with its optional dock that allows you to connect it to a TV and use external peripherals.

It's an absolute delight to use. After a bit of fiddling around to get it set up — much less than a MiSTer, particularly now there are helpful tools available, though of course you have to avoid the AI shit — it's a wonderful bit of kit. Quick to start up and jump into a game on any of the supported systems, and pretty much flawless performance on almost everything I've played. The only games I've had issues with are a couple of Lynx titles — Gauntlet: The Third Encounter has some iffy screen tearing due to an odd refresh rate (plus the core doesn't seem to support display modes when you rotate the screen, as is necessary for that game) and Rampart refuses to display the image that is supposed to come up before the "rebuild" section but is otherwise fully playable — and everything else has been just as if I'd bunged in a real cartridge and was playing on a real system.

Its ease of use and portability means that I'm very likely to pick it up and just have a play with it when I'm at a loose end — and in doing so I've already discovered some delightful handheld games that I'd like to play more of. Plus SNES, Mega Drive and PC Engine games look amazing on it.

In short, this thing wasn't cheap, but it was a very worthwhile investment. If you enjoy handheld and retro gaming, I highly recommend one.

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