Analogue Pocket gets save states, screenshots and more with AnalogueOS

Analogue, the boutique retro console manufacturer, has made a tradition out of pinning announcements to today’s date, October 16. First there was the Super NT, the company’s FPGA-based Super Nintendo clone, in 2017; then, the Mega SG, its Sega Genesis clone, in 2018; the still-unreleased Analogue Pocket in 2019; the similarly unreleased TurboGrafx 16 clone, the Duo, in 2020, which gets us to this year’s announcement which, for the first time is not hardware.

AnalogueOS is the underlying software that will run the upcoming Pocket and Duo, and other “future” consoles, the company says. (And no, the existing Analogue consoles “are not planned to be updated with AnalogueOS at this time” we’re told.) In addition to a very welcome visual refresh, which should better align the company’s excellent hardware design with its software experience, come some really significant enhancements, most notably “save states.”

Software emulators have a feature called save states. This allows players to bypass any built-in saving functions in games and instantly record their progress. It is possible to resume play at any time. Anyone familiar with the traditional solution — leaving your game console on indefinitely — has appreciated this feature of emulation. This is a characteristic that has been absent from FPGA-based hardware emulatemulation other than a small number of MiSTer cores.

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“Thank Kevtris,” Analogue’s Christopher Taber told Polygon, referring to Kevin Horton, its Director of FPGA Development. “It is more than just being complex but dually difficult to do this reliably, let alone on physical cartridges. As far as I know we’re the first to ever develop the technology to capture and load save states instantly during gameplay on physical cartridges.”

These save state can be shared with Pocket users. You can share these save states with Pocket users as well: Playlists and Screenshots. Although screenshots seem obvious, Playlists are new. “When you create a Playlist, it will generate a file on your SD card and you can share this file with other users,” Taber says. “Simply pull it off your SD card and drop it on another Pocket user’s SD card and they’ll instantly have access to your Playlist on their Pocket.”

Analogue

Analogue has created a brand new database called Library to power the Playlist functionality. “It is built around a new level of standardization, in terms of game title standardization, franchise, publisher and developer organization, revision depth and more,” Taber says. “It is being carefully curated by experts and researchers in conjunction with collectors with access to complete game sets. Library’s ultimate goal is to become the definitive scholarly repository for videogame history.

“Library will take full advantage of Analogue-developed proprietary technology to read physical game cartridges and detect all possible information on the game cartridge down to its revision (for example The Legend of Zelda: Link’s AwakeningEach version has 18 variations, with different revisions. There are many differences between these revisions, including text changes and game artwork. You can walk into a game shop, plug the game into your Pocket to read the cartridge and find out exactly what revision it is and all of its details.”

In addition to the new features coming to AnalogueOS, Taber shared some information on the Pocket’s additional developer-facing FPGA. “Pocket has been purpose built with the optimal hardware to make development and porting pre-existing [FPGA]It is easy to create cores. Off-the-shelf dev boards are naturally not built for this exact purpose; they’re pricey, require tons of add-ons, difficult technical setup for most users and limitations that cannot be ideally solved (namely different kinds of RAM) without building something exactly for this purpose from the ground up,” Taber notes, clearly targeting the MiSTer platform’s DIY approach, and immense library of cores. “You can expect to see pretty much every single third-party FPGA core out there on Pocket.

Analogue

“For the non-dev end user, it is as simple as dropping an FPGA core onto Pocket and it will be served by our Library and Database offering an unparalleled experience.” That experience will obviously work on the handheld Pocket’s display, but it will also work on HDTV displays via the optional Dock, and on CRTs using Analogue’s existing DAC product.

While AnalogueOS sounds exciting, the Pocket was announced two years ago now, and it’s been delayed again to December. There are still plenty of frustrated would-be buyers who missed out on a pre-order window for units that still haven’t shipped.

“More Pockets will be back in stock and shipping a bit after pre-orders ship,” Taber says. “Trust me, we’re doing everything we can to keep these in stock. COVID hasn’t done anybody any favors, but we’ve gone to great lengths to produce as many as possible and continue doing so.”