My Analogue Pocket is one year old now. Its firmware has since (somewhat) matured from the then 1.0B release to the 1.1 beta of July 2022 that (finally!) introduced the long-promised "Memories" and "Library" modes, allowing for real save states with the press of a simple button combination. The latest beta 7 stabilized these features and sped up screenshot time.

Since the release of the modern retro Game Boy incarnation, the second hand cartridge market exploded. As an example, consider the price evolution of the GBC game Wendy Every Witch Way, summarized in a chart by pricecharting.com:

This chart is a typical example; pick a few other popular GB(C) games and you'll see the same spikes:

• Near the end of 2019; when the Analogue Pocket was announced;
• Near the end of 2021; when the handheld console finally ready.

I've wondered more than once whether it's still worth it to collect physical copies of games, but with the Pocket, you have to: this is not your average Chinese emulation-based machine but a proper FPGA-based hardware re-implementation of the different Nintendo handheld cores.

Ah yes, and other cores as well. The open source MiSTer project already contained similar cores to run retro games, and they've been back-ported to the Pocket with great success: see the cores inventory list. That basically means if you upload a core to the microSD slot along with a ROM dump---which, of course, you made yourself with a tool like the GBxCart---you can play your "real cartridge" games without inserting the cartridge. If fiddling with these things is too much for you, there's even a beautiful Windows GUI app auto updater for your Pocket's cores.

You'd lose the fun of inserting a plastic shell, cursing when the "ERROR" screen appears, pulling it out, blowing, and re-inserting it, but since the 1.1 beta firmware release, it's possible, which is simply amazing. That also means you don't necessarily need those very expensive adapters. The Pocket Adapter Set, still coming in 2023, is a set of 3 converters: for the TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine, the Neo Geo Pocket Color, and the Atari Lynx. That'll set you back $99.99, excluding $30 shipping to Europe and an optimistic estimated $40 of extra taxes. Ouch. I'm sure the official adapters will offer better compatibility and quality, but still.

I haven't touched any of the custom cores yet. Instead, I entertained myself by replaying my childhood favorites such as Kirby's Dream Land and the Wario Land games. The support for screenshots is a huge boon to me, as I love to capture my own video stills and write about games over at https://jefklakscodex.com/. It's a great way to track my plays and collect virtual memories.

According to the site, since April 2022, I played and finished the following games on the Pocket: Wendy Every Witch Way, Looney Tunes: Twouble, Looney Tunes, Looney Tunes Racing, Wo Framed Roger Rabbit, Tom and Jerry: Frantic Antics!, The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland, Looney Tunes Collector, Yogi Bear Gold Rush, Alfred Chicken, Speedy Gonzales: Aztec Adventure, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TNMT): Fall of the Foot Clan, TNMT II: Back from the Sewers, Tiny Toon Adventures: Babs' Big Break, Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Montana's Movie Madness, Kirby's Dream Land. That sounds like a lot, but if you factor in the average play time of a GB game at roughly one hour, it's really not.

Most of the above games are average at best, and some of them are very hard to finish without cheesing your way through using the new save state feature. Back in the early nineties, the average GB game, with a Memory Bank 1 chip, only was 128 KB big. It had to be artificially prolonged with death traps and a limited amount of continues, which can be pretty hard to go back to, especially if you never spend your entire childhood with the Grey Brick in hand, like I did.

Game Boy screenshots are taken at 160x144 which I blow up using the box filter of ImageMagick with mogrify -filter box -resize x400. That works nicely as these games are pixelated anyway.

The high price of the Analogue Pocket---especially for us suckers in Europe---is perhaps hard to justify, but looking back, I think it's one of the best ways I've ever spend a too large sum of money on a hardware toy. The screen quality of this thing is still mind blowing.

Just remember that the spending doesn't stop there: you'll (in theory) need to get your hands on those exquisite carts. And yes, sellers are very much aware of the current price trends... Be sure to bring a screwdriver, many Game Boy PCBs are fakes!