Analogue Pocket: The Game Boy, Rebuilt in Silicon

The original Game Boy's screen was 160 pixels wide and 144 tall. The Analogue Pocket's is 1600 by 1440, exactly ten times the resolution in each direction, packed into a 3.5-inch LCD at 615 pixels per inch. Analogue announced the handheld on October 16, 2019. It took more than two years, a pandemic and a global chip shortage before the handheld was released on December 13, 2021, at $199.99, in black or white.

Who Makes This Thing

Analogue was founded in 2011 by Christopher Taber, and for most of its life it has made one kind of product. Expensive, beautifully finished machines that play original cartridges from old consoles. The Nt mini, an NES, arrived in 2017. The Super Nt played Super Nintendo carts in 2018, and the Mega Sg did the same for Sega's 16-bit console in 2019. Each one was a hardware answer to a hobby that had mostly settled for software.

A big part of that story is Kevin Horton, an American electrical engineer known online as kevtris, whose FPGA work sits under Analogue's consoles from the Nt mini onward. Retro hardware fans knew his name long before Analogue put it on a spec sheet. The Pocket was the company's first handheld, and its first machine built around a portable classic rather than a living room console.

Why FPGA Isn't Emulation

Most retro gaming runs on emulators, software that pretends to be an old console while running on a modern processor. Emulators can be very good, but they are always an imitation. Timing quirks get approximated, input lag creeps in, and a game that leans on some odd hardware behavior can break in ways nobody notices for years.

A field-programmable gate array works differently. It is a chip whose internal logic can be rewired after it leaves the factory. Load the right configuration, called a core, and the chip behaves like the original circuitry, with signals moving in parallel the way they did on the real hardware. The Pocket uses two of them. An Altera Cyclone V with 49,000 logic elements does the heavy lifting, and a smaller Cyclone 10 with 15,000 handles system management.

There is a fair caveat. An FPGA core is still somebody's re-creation of a chip, and it is only as accurate as the work that went into it. But the approach removes the layer of software guesswork between the cartridge and the screen, and for players who care about exact timing, that is the point.

The Pocket's 1.1 software update arrived in July 2022, six months later than first planned, and introduced openFPGA, a framework that lets outside developers write their own cores for the hardware. The same update added save states, which Analogue calls Memories, and a Library of info cards for games.

Real Cartridges, Real Link Cables

Out of the box the Pocket plays original Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance cartridges. Adapters sold separately take Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Atari Lynx and TurboGrafx-16 games, so a drawer of 1990s handheld carts from several companies can run on one machine. There is a Game Boy link cable port, a microSD slot, a 3.5mm headphone jack and USB-C charging. The 4,300mAh battery is rated for 6 to 10 hours.

Plug it into the optional Analogue Dock and the Pocket sends video to a TV over HDMI, with support for wired and wireless controllers for local multiplayer. It also ships with Nanoloop, a music synthesizer and sequencer, which makes it a pocket instrument as much as a game machine. Fans of the tiny music gear in our Teenage Engineering OP-1 story will recognize the appeal.

The Shape of a Game Boy

The design argument is the most interesting thing about the Pocket. Nintendo's first handheld, the DMG-01 covered in our Game Boy history, measured 148 by 90 by 32 millimeters. The Pocket measures 149 by 86 by 22 and weighs 275 grams. It keeps the vertical layout, the screen up top and the controls below, but trades gray plastic for a flat, minimal shell that looks like it came out of a design studio rather than a toy factory. It won a Red Dot design award in 2022.

Analogue also learned the drop playbook that runs through our Supreme drop model feature. A glow-in-the-dark edition came in September 2023, followed by transparent colors in October and Classic editions in Game Boy colors in November. All-aluminum versions in white, black, gray and indigo followed on July 15, 2024. The clear shells put it in the same see-through tradition as Nothing's phone and earbuds.

Analogue kept going after the Pocket, with the Duo, a TurboGrafx-16 machine, and in 2025 the Analogue 3D, an FPGA take on the Nintendo 64, the console that went up against the original PlayStation. For the full spec list, see the Analogue Pocket entry on Wikipedia and TechCrunch's report on the launch.

More handheld history lives in the tech section and our gaming hub.

One more detail from that July 2022 update. Alongside openFPGA, Analogue added a core for the DEC PDP-1 computer so the Pocket could run Spacewar!, a game written for that machine in 1962. It is now playable on a device that fits in a back pocket, 27 years older than the Game Boy whose cartridges it was built to read.