- It's "Retro Time".
And I dropped it. (man laughs) This here is an AGS one-on-one Game Boy Advance SP.
Now why am I showing you a Game Boy Advance? The reason I'm showing it to you
is because it has a similar form factor to what we are going to be looking at.
What we're looking at is also running the same cartridges.
That was still on, I think. No, it wasn't.
Great. (man laughs) This is the Analog Pocket.
They're similar in concept to the MiSTer we just looked at
and like everything else they've made, it's using an FPGA.
And that's why this is so interesting to me because they're not efficient chips.
Not at all. They're very good at what they do. They're versatile.
There's not a whole lot on here except for a nice glowing green sticker on the bact
that says Analog Pocket Console black USB-C cable, which I guess is just the package contents.
So, let's get it out of here and see what it looks like. I've been waiting so long for this.
They announced this console years ago,
before short-circuit existed and it looks fantastic.
That matte finish along with the glossy screen, you can kinda see that there's a bezel around the screen
and it's a little bit chunkier. This is the GBA SP and it's just closed here
and it's about the same thickness. Actually almost exactly.
The GBA is a little bit thicker. It's not unwieldy or anything.
In fact, it feels really nice in the hand. Oh, I've got a banana for scale.
Of course. Ah, now we can tell that...
- [Man] Nothing. - Now the buttons, on the original GBA SP
they're kinda cliquey. You can...
Yeah, this one's kinda well used. I don't think the buttons are new, but they're clicky.
They click in. These buttons are more like, what you'd get on a Super Nintendo controller.
They've got rubber membranes. So, they've got smoother actuation
as opposed to these just click, click,
which I personally prefer. The only thing that has touch switches that I can see
are the shoulder buttons and probably the start and select an analog buttons.
Yes, those are touch switches as well. It doesn't look through the battery bay opens up at all.
So this is a fixed lithium-ion battery. It looks like we've got a power button here
plus add/minus volume. Speaker on that side and another speaker on this side.
So we've got stereo speakers. USB type C, headphone Jack
and a link cable port.
The same link cable port. We'll be testing that later.
And by default it takes Game Boy style cartridges.
So Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color and it has cores for all of those.
It also has cores for the second Game Gear, the Neo Geo Pocket and the Atari Lynx
which is actually very rare. I've seen a Lynx once in person.
In this case, this is a Game Boy Advanced cartridge. It's an Everdrive GBA. It's got one of these nice little micro SD cards in it
with games. These actually can put extra strain on these older pieces of hardware.
So it's actually kind of a good thing that I've got it plugged into something
that's a little bit more robust. It is a little strange
to see the Game Boy Advanced Character just kind of hanging out back here
with a big gap there, but when your finger touches it,
when you're holding the shoulder buttons,
it's a little weird. I could see that being a little bit annoying.
If you have the dock, you probably don't have that problem. And also I think it has Bluetooth support built in,
so you could in theory, pair an 8BitDo controller or something.
Although, there's no stand or anything, So that would just be bad.
The screen is actually supposed to be really good. It's exactly 10 times the resolution
of the original Game Boy. Which means that not only is it high resolution,
but it's a straight one-to-one scale. It's not going to be interpreted in any way.
It's just gonna be. So, that's a thing that I'm looking forward to seeing.
But first, I need to talk to you about our sponsor, Vessi.
Vessi Footwear is known for being lightweight, easy to pack, comfortable and most importantly, waterproof.
And in order to keep you moving, Vessi designed their new everyday move shoes.
With enhanced breathability and added support, this style is perfect for the adventurous
or for those looking for something sportier. Featuring a pull tab to take them off and put them back on
these vegan suede lace cages, extra mid-sole cushioning
and the same waterproof diamond tech technology, you'll wanna wear them everywhere.
Keep your feet dry and save $25 with our offer code shortcircuit at Vessi.com/ShortCircuit.
All right, actually I was going to turn it on, but first there's some extra stuff in the box
that I realized I hadn't talked about. So there's the USB type C cable
wrapped in this rather Apple-like cardboard wrapping that I approve of.
A USB type C to C cable is also included. Although I don't see a charger in here
which may or may not be a problem for you. I mean, I'm ambivalent towards it.
I can't get this out, whatever it is. (man laughs) Ah, here we go.
Okay. - [Man] Are these stickers? Ooh. - FPGA. Let's just put that right there.
- [Man] Got them. - Yeah, got them. (man laughs) Let's see.
Analog Pocket quick-start guide for more information. Clean your game cartridges thoroughly before you use.
A lot of old cartridges are real dirty. It's probably got some corrosion on it
and that can kinda spread to other contexts that it touches
so you should probably clean your cartridges before you try. - [Man] Like blowing it.
- Spit on it. Let's power it on and see what happens.
This is not an OLED screen by the way. This is a IPS LCD.
It looks like it's got a tutorial. You know what? Let's do it.
Let's let's do this together. Press this button to continue, press this button to go back.
Well, okay, let's go back. They lied.
Press Analog for menu, but it didn't do anything. This is a bad tutorial, you guys.
Hold Analog and press left or right to cycle original display modes. Okay.
So LCD filters as well as different color palettes.
Oh my God, it's got an end user license agreement and it's not properly centered.
Come on. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah.
Oh my God it's huge. - [Man] That's what she said.
- Oh, (beep) they've got a class action waiver in here. (man laughs)
So it's got a bunch of systems. Game Gear is listed here
even though Lynx should also be listed here and Neo Geo Pocket. I'm not sure.
There's a couple of different things that are built into this. So there's Nanoloop.
That's a digital audio workstation for basically GBA music.
So you can hook up to your computer and basically use it for sequencing.
That's pretty cool. Settings. So we can change all of the different things
for all the different hardware. Which is actually quite good because the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance
had very different screens. And even the Game Boy color had a pretty different screen
to either of those as well. And you can set the control so you can mirror
B and A to Y and X. So B and A is right here. I think Y and X are right here.
Wait, no that doesn't make any sense. Okay.
I was hoping that the Game Boy Advance section would allow you to map the shoulder buttons
to these face buttons that are here, but that's apparently not a thing.
There are some games that I prefer that with like "Castlevania: Circle of the Moon" comes to mind
where it's actually, I think better with four face buttons.
If I had an SD card with any kind of user made content,
I could probably go into the library here. But the library will not support things like Game Boy ROMs.
They're very explicitly not using this for piracy.
I literally have one of the games we're gonna be playing right here.
And the reason I have that is because I'm gonna use
a link cable to see if I can get multiplayer going on this.
Yeah, that's a pretty bright screen. It's a little squished.
I think the Game Boy Advance did have a different aspect ratio to the standard Game Boy.
Okay. So analog GBA, that's just pixel scaling, nearest neighbor.
Yeah, that's nearest neighbor. It's sharp. Hit right once, you got a original GBA LCD.
It's got an LCD filter on there that it makes it look pretty decent.
It's not amazing. I don't think it's perfectly accurate.
I don't know, it might be. No, it is. The next over is originally Game Boy Advance SP one-on-one.
Oh, I just happened to have one of these right here.
That's all the modes. Oh, that's a little disappointing.
But I guess for the Game Boy advance you're not gonna want that many different modes anyway.
Oh, that's loud. (game music)
I was hearing clipping. I'm not sure if it's the volume.
Instruments aren't amazing sounding in "Sonic Advance".
Let's go to the sound test here. (game music)
Let's try "Sonic Advance" on the original Game Boy Advance.
Obviously you don't get the BIOS boot up sound on the Analog Pocket.
Oh, okay. (game music)
Yeah. No, that sounded about the same. Anyway, let's get back into "Sonic Advance"
to see how that plays. The volume is much higher.
Holy crap. (game music)
That's about as loud as the other one was. The colors are darker,
perhaps more accurate in the Analog Pocket. Fun fact about the GBA, it didn't have a backlight
so a lot of games actually over brightened their colors.
So a lot of GBA games, even though they could look really good,
look like trash on emulators or whatever, because they were compensating for this
to try and brute force through that dark LCD.
Okay. There is very little if any delay
and the buttons feel pretty good. Okay, the screen is real bright.
It is a little weird how it's not quite the right aspect ratio,
but I get that they're going for the original Game Boy aspect ratio first,
rather than Game Boy Advance. I think statistically more people would favor the original Game Boy aspect ratio.
Let me throw a "Tetris Worlds" into... I guess either one of these, it doesn't matter.
That's as bright as this one gets by the way. Yeah, so the colors are very different.
It looks like there's more saturation
on the original Game Boy and also the color temperature is very different as well.
Obviously, if you're looking for the original experience, it's not quite that.
No, it looks closer to what you would see if you fired up an emulator.
Wait, hang on. Oh, I'm stupid. I was in original Game Boy mode.
Yeah, there's still more green in this screen
and none of the colors really line up properly. There might be some degradation, I don't really know.
But I do think that the way this screen looks is...
You can actually see the (indistinct) and stuff. So there's the thing you can't see on
the original Game Boy screening. You kinda make it out. But all right, let me turn this down
so we don't have both of them going at once. Now the colors are again very different.
Now, this is more purple than this is. This is a red or a shade of purple.
Obviously the controls feel a lot better
on the analog pocket. At least to me.
Now I'm very curious. This game does support multiplayer via link cable,
I'm pretty sure. Don't quite know how this multi cable works.
Why couldn't they use this music for the gameplay?
(game music) This isn't gonna work with an original GBA.
- [Mark] It's 'cause it's not Zelda. - Ah. - [Jono] God damn it.
- That's the problem. Well that's disappointing. For whatever reason,
it might be that the version of the game that I have on the everdrive here,
is different than the version of the game we have here. And supposedly this does work in Game Boy to pocket mode
as well as pocket to pocket. However, when I was poking around, I did notice something else.
There's this high quality audio option here. You also have things like frame blending,
which kinda simulates that blurry kinda motion
on the old LCDs. Well as sharpness filters, which I'm not sure what that does exactly.
It just says plus three, but I don't really see it doing anything. I'm not sure.
Also size and position doesn't seem to be possible to adjust.
Maybe there's still some stuff that needs to be updated.
Anyway, let's try "Sonic Advance". See if that audio cleaned up any.
(game music)
Okay. Well I just added myself as an emulator user. That sounded a lot better.
I wanna take it apart. - [Jono] Throw all the bits in and see which one fits.
- See which bit fits. It's a little small, but it works.
Big screws. So I felt this kinda...
Okay. - [Jono] There you go.
- So that's the battery. 15.91 watt hours.
It seems pretty repairable. The battery's in this this little caddy here.
There's a connector for it. And then this plate.
I think there's extra screws or are these just clips?
I'm not sure if we want to wrench on it too much more though. But it's nice to know that the battery's replaceable
and it seems to be pretty repairable. There we go.
So, the Analog Pocket.
What are my thoughts? The battery life that I've observed so far is pretty decent.
This is a 600 maH power battery by default and it runs for just as long as this 4300 maH battery.
It's a power hungry piece of hardware, but they made it work.
The original GBA... What was the original GBA's...
All right, sorry. GBA SP's battery life. - [Man] Seven to 10.
- So seven to 10. So it's just comparable. Pretty good form factor.
I like the buttons. I like the screen.
The operating system, everything is kind of skewed over a little bit,
which is a little bit weird. And I would like to see more controls
because I'd like to be able to map the L and R buttons to the face buttons for some games on the GBA.
It just makes more sense that way, even though the original hardware you would have to use those buttons.
The original hardware just used that because it didn't really have a choice.
But now we do. - [Man] It says all buttons are mappable though.
- Yeah, but it doesn't let me do that. It just let's me mirror buttons.
Maybe that's something that's coming later. They do add more features later on down the road
when they release these consoles, so. But I like the screen.
I like the screen quality. It's a different screen.
There are some times compatibility issues with these FPGA emulators
but usually analog is pretty good about fixing them.
They do have a bit of a reputation in the community for boasting a hundred percent accuracy
and all that kinda stuff, but it's not. But what they've created here is a really solid piece of hardware.
I really dig it. And I think for $200 you could do a lot worse.
You could get an Amber Knack, you could get a Retro, you can get any number of emulation handhelds,
but the experience wouldn't be quite as good. This boots up in two seconds.
It's the advantage of having the FPGA. Again, I'm not gonna say it's perfect, but I like it.
And I would like to have more of them
to kinda try out more of this link cable stuff. And I would like to have the dock
to try and see what that's like, because right now the only way to couch game a GBA
is either if you have the Game Boy player, which is expensive to find with a disk.
The players themselves aren't all that expensive, but they're worthless without the disc and emulators.
That's basically it. - [Man] The dock is a hundred bucks. (coughs)
- A hundred bucks for the dock, okay. - [Man] And $30 for each adopter.
- 30 bucks for each adapter, that's not bad. As for the dock...
But at the same time, the dock's got an HTMI connection to it. If you don't want to faff around with old hardware, scalers,
all that kinda stuff, yeah. They're not gonna say that it's the best value thing out there,
but it's quality and it's convenient.
And I don't really have any major complaints.
Hopefully they make more for stock and hopefully they send us another one 'cause we're gonna need one.
'Cause I'm heading home now. Go watch the MiSTer multi-system
if you want more on this kind of FPGA goodness.
Again, FPGAs are not a silver bullet, but when they work, they work real well.