System: Analogue Duo
Price: $249.99
Release Date: 12/2023

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Prelude

Years ago, Analogue announced a FPGA version of my all time favorite gaming console: the Turbografx 16. I didn’t have too much experience with their products then, but with my all time favorite system being revived, I was pretty eager to hear more about the console, and I bought and enjoyed a Mega SG and RetroUSB AVS in the meantime to entertain myself with FPGA systems. After a good while of it sounding like vaporware and vanishing into thin air, it finally re-emerged last year and partially shipped to some early buyers last December.

I managed to get mine off a good friend who let me purchase his, and I figured it would be a great time to expand my small US collection and branch out into CD/Japanese game collecting as a whole, and give this thing a spin. The Turbografx market is very tough and pricey to break into, so unlike a Sega or Super Nintendo, you won’t be able to batch buy a tons of cheap sports games to see how the thing works. Still, I’m more than willing to experiment, and I have a good assortment of 30 HuCard games and several CDs to throw at it now, and have played it for over a month. Just how is it, and is it really super accurate with “no emulation”?

Presentation

At a glance, the system itself looks pretty plain, being a rectangle with two front-facing slots to insert your games into, and the wired controller port being a singular one off to the side. If you were hoping to rush in with a US TG controller, you’re outta luck, as the Duo’s controller port is the same one as the Japanese PC Engine, which would later be reused for the US TurboDuo console. Luckily, aftermarket adapters are available pretty easily for US controllers, so I was able to hook up an Old School pad with no issues, and ended up mainly using the wireless 8Bitdo pad for my gaming sessions. The device feels more at home with that pad anyhow.

The UI of the Duo upon booting it up, and either playing it raw or installing the latest firmware, (the one as of today’s review timing being the 1.1 update) is very, very plain, especially compared to prior analogue home consoles. It’s meant to be the same sort of UI as the Analogue Pocket and thus the Analogue Dock that you can buy with it, but even then, I feel this UI is laughably poor compared to the sharp and clean looking UIs from the Mega SG and Super NT. You have an option to boot into the game, a library to browse that catalogs your playtimes per game, a Memories section to store screenshots, (and later on, save states for Hucard stuff) and that’s literally all you have to mess with. There are some visual/audio options available here, but not that many, and outside of a few handy scaling options, I found none of them particularly useful, which is a shame considering how robust the Mega SG’s video options were.

Speaking of the library, that is the one part of the UI I do like quite a bit, and I think it’s pretty neat to have all your games cataloged by time/date and the amount of time you’ve played them. However, I will note that while most pre-launch reviews had the library shown off with title screens or key art for every game included in it, the actual system doesn’t give you means to attach images to the library games at all; that was only a thing provided to review copy units via an SD card. Thus, the community had to take a stand and compile some handy library folders to display each game in either a title screen form or via the box arts, and while this extra step is pretty irritating at first, I do think having my games represented by the box art is pretty fun. I sure wish Analogue made the default, no-image thumbnail leagues more interesting than the generic no image pic they went for, though.

So, how do the games look? Pretty darn good! The scaling options work great here and all the games I threw at it looked fine enough and the colors were accurate, and there’s an alternate color palette if you feel the composite or RGB mode you picked isn’t the right one. Still, both modes are way, way better looking than the abhorrent Level Hike palette I dealt with some years back, which just destroyed all the purple colors. No purple problems here! Everything looks absolutely stunning on a modern display, even games with varying resolutions.

The audio on the other hand… Boy, this really pains me, especially since I thought by the time I’d get around to this review they would have fixed it, but the PSG audio, especially certain sound effect channels, are just completely off. Most, if not all music tracks I’ve listened to via the console sound fine, but certain sound effects are slightly off pitch, and if you’re familiar with a game and how it normally sounds, either via previous reissue or original hardware, then the pitch difference will drive you mad. When I replayed Telenet’s Exile, I immediately noticed the jump sound was off, and far more noticeable was in Legendary Axe II, where boss explosions and attack sounds are just completely drowned out from how they’re supposed to sound like.

Considering that it seems like a very small channel that’s impacted by this inaccuracy, and the CD audio side of things is 100% perfect, I really hope they can fix this soon, but it’s utterly silly that we’re in several months of the product being out on the market and a fix hasn’t been remotely hinted at.

Gameplay

Presentational quirks aside, your options for actually playing games on this thing are shockingly limited. You put in a HuCard in the slot, or a CD game in the disc drive, and can pick either or on the start up screen. Again, with little visual options and tweak settings on the thing compared to the SG, it does mean you’re pretty much just going in and out of games to play them like you normally would, but you do have the ability to take screenshots or use the home button to back out of a game if you’re using the 8Bitdo pad. (Both can still be done on a normal Turbo Pad with button combos) Random gameplay images in this review were all captured via this feature.

For Hucard games, I found that all of my games work pretty well on this, even my super dirty, barely read by my US TurboGrafx Final Lap Twin copy managed to work great after a deep clean for the duo. The only exception I noticed was Ganbare Golf Boys, an early era PC Engine Golf game that plays fine, but somehow isn’t in the library at all and shows up as a generic HuCard instead. Digging deeper, and it seems Analogue honest to god forgot the game existed. Kinda a funny oversight, since it’s surprisingly a fun sports game! 2 Button and 6 button OS toggles are available if you happen to own a pad like the Avenue 6, but considering that I don’t and none of my games support that pad, I just stuck to the two button approach for playing my library.

My CD games work mostly as they should, too. You can choose to have it autodetect the CD card the inserted game is requesting, or you can manually force a specific one, either to load the funny Super CD error screens on purpose, or disable/enable Arcade Card enhancements for the games that support it. Even old games with minor scratches loaded fine in my duo and read well, and brand new CDs and even my own CDRs I burned Homebrew games and a few fan patches onto all played normally on the device, with none giving me an outright incompatibility.

With that said, there have been reports of certain games with long cutscenes (such as the PCE port of Snatcher) just utterly stopping in the middle of them and refusing to load the next segment, due to the disc drive choosing to go to sleep. In fact, this was the only major issue I had with the drive, as while it would load games normally, sometimes it would just outright forget to start loading the next part of the game I was playing, making it hang and go on a black screen. Since this isn’t a top loading device that you can resume spinning with a quick open and shut, this forces you to quit the entire game just to spin the disc again; hope you didn’t play a single session shmup or platformer that lacks a save/password feature when the drive decided to go to sleep!

Quite bluntly, that random, uncommon, yet very frustrating phenomenon was enough for me to just drop playing certain CD titles then and there, since the mere fact I had several games just stop loading mid-session on me for seemingly no reason whatsoever, is absurd! It’s less annoying in the games like RPGs where you can save pretty often, but for stuff like Panic Bomber or Gate of Thunder? Yeah, I’ll wait and hope for a patch to fix this major flaw. Thankfully, hucards do not abruptly stop mid-game and you can play those as long as you like without worry.

Speaking of playing without worry, I had another concern when I originally got my Duo, mainly due to a factor I noticed when trying to play a game of Volfied with my Old School pad, and that was how button combos are mapped. Unlike the Mega SG, you can’t remap the OS button combos to be what you want, so thus part of a cheat code for Volfied was impossible as holding down the start button + Down for this cheat would bring up the Duo menu every single time, without fail. The 8Bitdo pads did this too obviously, but even a wired controller that would have pulled the cheat off on real hardware flat out couldn’t do it on the Duo. So what’s the big deal here?

Well, that’s when I noticed the Passthrough mode option, and luckily this does mitigate the lack of OS shortcut remapping. Turn this on before booting a game, and your TG wired pad will work just like it originally did, with no shortcuts enabled, and the turbo switch speeds getting more accurate to the OG machine, too. Granted, you still won’t be able to do anything with a wireless 8Bitdo pad with Passthrough mode, so I hope you can rearrange and remap the OS shortcuts in a future update, just like you can on Mega SG.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I’m very mixed on the Duo, and I gave it a good month to see if there would be any extra updates to fix the lingering bugs present on this thing, but as of publishing I’m still only able to update to 1.1b. As a replacement for the OG TG16, it works pretty darn well for Hucard stuff, and the wireless controller meant for the thing works outstandingly well.

Sadly, some minor sound effect inaccuracy does sour my mood on the HuCard experience a little bit, and the amount of weird CD issues and OS clunkiness really show that this thing has a long, long ways to go in order to become as much of a must-own as the Mega SG was to Sega fans. Other oddities such as wired controllers acting funny without Passthrough mode are also a pain to deal with, and I can’t help but feel that this console came out of the oven a little bit early.

Still, considering how stupidly rare a real TGCD is (I spent years trying to find a good working one to pair with my Turbo, to no avail) and how this device has all the card types built in, plus the region free aspect of it all, I really do hope those issues get ironed out to make the Duo easy to recommend for all Turbo fans, new and old. But man, the fact CDs just love to act up on this thing is makes me concerned about the longevity of the disc drive more than anything else, along with the total lack of communication on future updates.

If a year from now this is like the Mega SG in terms of feature set and quality, I’ll be thrilled to eat my hat on the doubts I expressed here. But as it stands now, I really have to advise you only buy a Duo and spend the high cost of entry if you’re already a megafan and have some games lined up, preferably Hucards; otherwise you’ll be in for a long, bumpy ride and competing with that fierce aftermarket.

I give the Analogue Duo a 6 out of 10.