Title: Analogue Pocket
Price: $219.99
Release Date: They really just threw darts on the board after 2020 until it became more commonly available in waves, so whenever they feel like restocking it now, it was in stock when I started the draft, now it’s outta stock when live. Maybe it’ll be in stock again when you read this, I do not know
Prelude
Around five years ago, The Analogue Pocket began to take off like wildfire; hype for preorders, promises of all sorts of things it could do, following up from the FPGA hits of the Analogue NT Mini, Super NT and SG. Being able to play GB-GBA games flawlessly, plus adapters for a bunch of obscure handhelds (and the TG16, because why not) to further expand the library capabilities? GB studio support for indie games and being able to tinker around in it? DAC support for playing these older games on a CRT? (Making Lynx/NGPC CRT compatible for the first time ever?) All of it sounded like a dream come true!
Well, five years since the hype of the reveal/first updates of it, the system has long since shipped out to people. It was reviewed heavily back when the first orders arrived, praised like it was God returning to the planet Earth and treated like the ultimate gaming thing ever with promising future support and updates to come. Yet with the Analogue Duo, I saw an unfortunate, post-review reality with that system which I had some naive hopes of my own with. The swift pre-review to launch updates to fix compatibility Youtuber People mentioned, promises of DAC support in the future, and some upcoming features (like save states) touted, seemed to indicate the Duo would get the occasional, yet big update.
Sadly the reality of that wasn’t the case. As I observed the Pocket being behind on some promised things going as far back as last year, I quickly realized if it wasn’t shiny and brand new, (or hyper popular like the Pocket) an analogue product would basically get the bare essentials in terms of post-launch support. For over a year, the Duo didn’t get certain games to work on the system at all, and some were even absent from the on-system library. (These weren’t homebrew games, but real obscurities like Ganbare Golf Boys)
It wasn’t until an update came out this very year when some of those issues finally got fixed, with only one glaring one remaining that also applies to the Pocket. If it wasn’t for that update, I’d have made a re-review or post-review update on the Duo. Nevertheless, that whole post-launch lack of support/bad communication led to me not really wanting an Analogue Pocket, but eventually come April and with concerns over the increase in tariffs, I decided to jump in, buy all the adapters, and give it a spin while also deciding to make a review outta it when I felt comfortable doing so.
Well, you’re reading this now, so I’ve spent dozens of hours with the thing since April and still regularly play it. How is it 5 years later? Would a newcomer that buys it during a restock be able to enjoy it? What about all those promised features? We have a lot to cover…
Presentation
When first using the Analogue Pocket and getting to grips with the very simplistic UI (later reused in the Duo), I have to stress you need to update the system immediately. Most of the cooler system features are only available with firmware updates, and having a MicroSD card inside lets you use Save States, Screenshots and any of the OpenFPGA stuff if that’s your thing. We’ll go over all those features later, but the updates also fixed some pretty nasty bugs, with one infamous one from the earlier days being how the sleep mode feature could completely wipe your Pokemon saves clean, especially in the games with RTC.
If you don’t back them up via something like a GBAXCart, this could really be devastating, so I encourage you to update and use a MicroSD card for the sake of being able to use most of the things I bring up in the review, such as the optional adapters. I will describe/show off the adapters in this review, but my final score will be ultimately based on just the Analogue Pocket, no adapters.
With that giant disclaimer outta the way, how does the Pocket look and feel? Well, it sure looks and feels like an OG Game Boy, for better or worse. It manages to be bigger than my childhood GBC, which also means the screen is bigger as a result. Thankfully for GB/GBC games, the bigger screen didn’t hurt at all and in fact worked out pretty well for those titles. The pixel scaling is pretty great and there are even a few extra visual options to mess around with if you want more adjustment there, and the best visual feature of the Pocket are the screen filters.
For GB, these replicate the various different models of Game Boy, changing color palettes to fit the various types with a LCD filter applied, one that’s quite excellent. I’ve always found LCD filters to be better than most CRT filters, and these might just be some of the best I’ve experienced to date. The GBC one is especially great, as it reproduces the slightly lighter colors the OG GBC would show due to the lack of a light. Being a person who grew up obsessed with those GBC colors and using a worm light in emergencies, this filter was an absolute dream, though there’s also a LCD filter for the more “normal” colors you might be used to via emulation/GBA/GB Player.
Lastly, the GBA support is where the form factor of the Pocket gets a bit weird. Being that it’s shaped like a brick Game Boy, has a square screen like a brick game boy, and has the feel of a brick Game Boy, just how the heck could games meant for a wider screen work out on this thing? Surprisingly well, albeit not as well as the GB/GBC stuff. The GBA carts slot in just fine and playing something with L/R usage didn’t cause a situation where the GBA cart got loose from the button presses, an issue I did see reported from very early batches of the Pocket. The only major no-no I encountered when using GBA stuff, was how my GBA E-reader just would not fit no matter what I tried doing, making me assume I either need some kind of extender or it just won’t work at all.
The GBA also has its own LCD screen filters, with an OG GBA filter meant to replicate the colors of that first model, which was the only one I ended up having for the entirety of my childhood. Like the GBC one, it looks great, though very late-era GBA titles can look a little bizarre with this filter on, since some late GBA games were made with DS/GBA SP play in mind, unlike earlier GBA games which were meant for the dimmer, original screen. Thankfully there’s also a GBA SP 101 filter for those who prefer that style.
That’s about all you get straight out of the box. Three systems, all supported almost perfectly, (more on that in a lil bit) all fitting into the cart slot with next to no issues. Some carts might need deep cleaning via a Q-Tip, but otherwise once that was done I was able to throw almost every game into this slot without any mid-game issues. Still, the cart slot is a bit picky, so if you notice a game isn’t wanting to play nice, be sure to use the Q-Tip/Alcohol combo.
The last thing I’ll note before we get into the expansion stuff is the build of the Pocket itself. For the months I’ve had this, the system is pretty darn solid. Slap a Tempered Glass screen protector on this thing immediately and you’ll be good, provided you don’t throw the thing. I also bought a hard, sturdy case for the Pocket, which helped me on travel trips with it. However, over the summer I noticed that mysteriously, the plastic on the pocket began to crack; it didn’t impact playability whatsoever, nor do I have any idea what caused it, but now there’s almost like a fault line on my Pocket’s back, which makes me wonder if maybe the screws came on a bit too tight and that did it. Theoretically, if I got a new back for the pocket I’d be able to fix this, but for now it just looks a bit off and is something to be aware of.
So now with all that out of the way, we have the expansion items to talk about, or at least the ones I was able/willing to acquire. No Dock, sorry. Let’s start by talking about the item we don’t have that was promised upon the initial reveal: the Analogue DAC. This was a cool little thing meant to display stuff from their earlier systems on a real CRT/older monitor, using a variety of ports on the device. You could keep things simple, or be a big nerd using the highest quality cables imaginable for the ultimate CRT image. It was a bit of a niche thing, but it was a common trend with Analogue products up until this system’s release.
See, that’s because while support for the DAC was promised pretty much out of the gate, it has still not materialized over five years later. In fact, the DAC itself hasn’t been in stock for years and years, with no explanation in the slightest. Finding the DAC on eBay is ludicrously hard, and when they do come up they are hundreds of dollars, so I can’t even buy one for my Mega SG. So sure, maybe making more DACs is tougher now for some reason, that’d be a somewhat reasonable explanation.
Except the Analogue Duo also promised support for it, and there’s still not a peep about that either. In fact, both mentions of future DAC support were quietly wiped off the analogue website sometime last year (they still appear to be part of the FAQ I looked at, though), and I know for a fact multiple pretty big people in the gaming space (who originally got to review this thing and have even reviewed the recent Analogue 3D) have been unsuccessful in trying to get Analogue or their CEO to say anything about what the hell is up with the DAC. If anything, their CEO seems more obsessed with saying the word Fuck a lot in interviews to boast how cool their products are than actually answering anything about this falsely advertised, missing feature. It’s a shame, since if the DAC did exist and I was able to buy one, I’d love to play NGPC games on my old CRT, plus the stuff on my Duo.
Thankfully, the promises of future adapters did pan out, and we have four of them to play around with, all offering extra systems for Pocket owners to enjoy, despite three of them almost appearing to be vaporware for a very long period of time. The first of these adapters was the Sega Game Gear, which also had adapters via the Mega SG. Just like with the SG, it was smart of Analogue to make an adapter for the Game Gear to keep those games alive since real Game Gears are notorious for all kinds of issues, whether they be the system’s infamous battery life, bad capacitors, finicky cart slots, or just suffering from the power of aging, leaving a lot of the excellent obscurities on the system very tough to actually sit down and play. Good luck finishing that Shinobi II GG final stage gauntlet on original hardware.
On the Pocket, the Game Gear adapter is incredibly easy to use. Just deep clean a game, put it in the adapter, put it in the cart slot, and while it does mostly block access to the L/R buttons, you never need them for Game Gear games, leading to GG titles playing on the Pocket just as easily as GB-GBA stuff. There’s even cool screen filter options ala GBC, with a GG LCD filter meant to replicate the very bad light effect from original hardware, one that looks pretty cool if I do say so myself, and continuing the trend of great LCD filters for the Pocket.
What makes the GG adapter even cooler than I initially gave it credit for though, comes from the extra system you can play via the adapter; the OG Game Gear would let you play Sega Master System games via an adapter called the Master Gear Converter, which basically took SMS games and heavily scaled them down to Game Gear size, while playing relatively the same as they would on SMS outside of the smaller screen. Shockingly, the Analogue Pocket doesn’t just let you put the Master Gear converter into the GG adapter and it actually fits, but it actually works with Master System cartridges, to the point you can even use the filters and save states just fine like you would for a Game Gear game.
This adds an extra bit of console variety to the mix, and all the SMS games I threw at the pocket worked just fine, even if the combined adapters led to it towering like a tree growing out of the Pocket. Even better, the SMS games don’t get shrunk down like they would on a real GG, so they’re in full resolution! No FM audio support though, unlike the SMS adapter on the SG.
Next up are the three adapters that came out years later, first shipping in 2024. These honestly felt like myths to me for the longest time due to the lack of communication on the matter, and next to no video proof/footage of these adapters in action until they were real and shipping out to people. These are for the Atari Lynx, Neo Geo Pocket Color, and Turbografx 16, and both Lynx/NGPC are pretty similar in LCD filter options to the GB-GBA/GG, with them having a filter meant to show colors as they’d appear on the original system, or LCD filters with better color options. I only have a small amount of games for both systems so we’ll just cover my experiences with the playability in the Gameplay section, but in terms of filters/audio quality, both consoles are fine.
The TG16 on the other hand is where I was really able to take a liking to this adapter. The Turboexpress is another troubled handheld ala the Game Gear, in that the original units barely function, need repairs and have a lot of problems making them not practical to use in the modern era. Playing my TG16/PCE hucards on the Pocket Adapter was a pretty great experience, and the filters on offer match those of the Analogue Duo, meaning you have an OK CRT filter, a great filter for the TurboExpress, (which works better here than on the Duo since you know, this is a handheld) and a PC Engine LT filter for if you’re a weird nerd.
Playing this with Street Fighter II in the adapter on the TurboExpress filter just makes me really ponder if many American kids went out of their way to get an express, PC Engine adapter and an import copy of Street Fighter II back in the day, since having arcade-quality SFII visuals on the go would be beyond mindblowing; not so much nowadays in an age with the Arcade SFII games being on a bajillion handhelds you can buy, but the PCE Street Fighter II is still pretty fun to play around with. Funnily enough, the L/R buttons will technically work in 6-Button games, but they’re very impractical to push due to the nature of the adapter’s placement. Otherwise, my PCE/TG hucards all work on the system just fine, and even Ganbare Golf Boys is registered in the library now, unlike how it was ont the Duo/Pocket before the recent 2025 update. That being said, it’s not perfect, with Hana Taka Daka being a known problem game that completely shits itself when trying to run on the Pocket. Still, the three bonus adapters offer solid visual options and great audio emulation, all looking great on the Pocket screen.
Gameplay
With all of those presentational quirks and how the lovely LCD screen makes this device sing, how about the actual playability? After all, a system might look pretty, but if the emulation is bad or if the gameplay is poor, that can hinder the experience of certain games or make others pure hell to play.
For starters, the compatibility. I’ve spent dozens of hours with this system since April. I’ve thrown a ton of games from every single adapter imaginable at the thing, and tried playing straight off the original carts at every possible opportunity, which means I currently have 400+ games logged into this unit’s library. Obscure PC Engine games, Game Boy imports, Master System Games, aftermarket Lynx titles, all of that got some play with no issues whatsoever. Pocket Puyo Puyo-n, Momotarou Densetsu Turbo, Microvaders, Thunder Blade, Zool, Sonic Pocket Adventure, all of them worked flawlessly and brilliantly on the unit.
Of all my games, only a singular cartridge refused to work in any fashion, no matter how deep I cleaned it and after confirming it worked fine on my real GBC, and that was Action Man: Search for Base X. You might wonder “well Connor, why would you care about a random licensed game? I thought you hated those” and that’s a fair point, except in recent years I became aware Natsume Atari developed some pretty fun obscurities for the GBC/GBA, usually based of licenses like Power Rangers. The GBC Power Rangers games are shockingly fun platformers with Time Force in particular being pretty darn great, and all of them have similar music/sound styles to their NES work, meaning you get some pretty phenomenal tracks to go along with solid action. Action Man is another one i’ve had some good fun with, with solid music and an interesting non-linear structure adding some light replayability to the mix. So when my Action Man just didn’t work on the Pocket no matter what I did, that was a huge bummer, and a baffling omission. You’re telling me obscure, ancient JP only puzzlers or PC Engine Shogi games can play just fine on the pocket, but not an ESRB rated action game from the early 2000s? That’s just silly.
It’d be one thing if this was me reviewing the Analogue Pocket in its early years where it still had bumps to work out and things in need of fixing, but I’m nearing the fifth year of this thing being on the market, and the fourth of this being available to customers. As far back as the early days of the Pocket, this incompatibility was noted by players, which makes it beyond inexcusable the game still does not work after all this time. Even stupider, apparently the GBC core through OpenFPGA plays this game with zero issues, which means somehow a fan-made core outdid what Analogue wouldn’t/couldn’t/didn’t fix. So Action Man fans, you’re outta luck. While I’m happy the bulk of my 400+ games worked flawlessly, I’m still miffed at how such a simple incompatibility was just left unfixed, ignored, and abandoned in the same way that the promised DAC support went quietly into the night without any acknowledgement of it being an ongoing issue.
Still, for all things not Action Man, you’ll have a lot of fun, but first you gotta put the cartridge into the system, duh. Of course, the picky cart slot means you’ll probably have to give each cartridge a good clean with a Q-Tip and alcohol before you play anything too vintage, but once you have a snug fit and a clean cart you should be good to go, with wobble not causing my games to lock up or throw a fit once I gave them a good clean, even SMS ones in the two adapters. One cool benefit to getting this thing later is the aforementioned fix of GBA games not flying out of the slot when playing them with the shoulder buttons, since those carts are especially snug and don’t even wobble at all.
For the bulk of your system options, the buttons map to where you’d expect them to. GB/GBA are self explanatory, Lynx is a bit awkward but still gets the job done, including the flip mode, and NGPC/TG16 works great too, although 6 button support is incredibly awkward on the hand if you want to go for it. I had no issues with the shoulders or the face buttons and they were fine in all my various games, although I think due to my usage I eventually led to one of the face buttons getting a small chip on the rim. Doesn’t impact playability at all, but is a tiny blemish.
What does impact playability however, is the D-Pad. I heard horror stories about this D-Pad, with posts from early in the system’s life calling it awful and comparing it to the abysmal Switch Pro Controller, while others said recent color revisions/repressings of the Pocket completely fixed the issue. As one with a hatred for that Switch Pro pad, I was curious how bad this D-Pad would be, and my answer is a resounding “yeah it’s bad diagonally”. Four way movement in games was largely fine for me, and even playing most puzzle games like various forms of Tetris didn’t bug me nearly as much as the Switch Pro Controller did.
Yet in anything with diagonal movement, or a fighting game that needs you to charge from left to right, this D-Pad was the bane of my existence; better than the Super Pocket D-Pads, but still pretty darn bad considering the price of the Analogue Pocket. Street Fighter Alpha 3 GBA was hell on this thing, along with several run and guns or other eight-way action games I played. When a slight rock moving left or right can point your weapon diagonally down without you intending it to, that can make or break performance in a level you’re in big time or get you killed. If it was more on the upper side, it would have made Tetris unplayable too, but I don’t find soft dropping Columns pieces out of nowhere any less frustrating. Some have already fixed the D-Pad by modding a better one in, but you shouldn’t have to do that in order to get an optimal product, and with how good the 8bitdo stuff tends to be, I’m stunned this D-Pad has so many problems after all this time.
Well, at least if you mess up you have a handy QOL feature at your disposal, via Save States! Yes, while running a real cart you can make a save state and load it. Yes, you could use this to run a game, save state, replace the battery, load state and save game on new battery, to transfer saves without needing something fancy like a GBAXCart. I did that with Tetris Plus and all worked great there. I still don’t advise you use them over the in-game save unless you’re absolutely sure it won’t lead to you losing progress on accident, though.
But for GB, GBC, GBA, GG, SMS, and PCE the save states all worked great with no issues encountered across every game I used them on. Even multi-game collections like the Capcom Minimix or Namco Museums would load states from another game just fine, while some software emulators will throw a fit if you did that. Made for much easier, more work-friendly ways of making tiny bits of progress in older games without needing to write or type in passwords all the time or do the whole game in one go. You can even use the sleep button on the side of the unit and for most games this works fine, making a temporary save state and restoring it upon waking up the unit, although I’m so used to GB stuff being without a sleep mode I forget to use it most of the time. (and earlier firmwares would kill Pokemon saves by doing this, hence my warning to upgrade your firmware before you use the Pocket)
However, the Lynx and NGPC is where the save states get a bit wonky. NGPC just doesn’t support them at all, so you gotta play those games raw, (thankfully, not many NGPC games make you marathon stuff and have in-game saves that are pretty generous) while the Atari Lynx will let you save a state, but might not feel like loading it depending on what situation you’re in.
Maybe you’re in a certain table in Pinball Jam, and thus it’ll only load the state if you jump into that pinball table before doing so. Or maybe you’re on the Toki title screen but want to load a level, but no, you gotta start the game first, then it’ll cooperate. Just utterly bizarre, and sleep mode basically never worked with Lynx games, either. Luckily in-game saves for Microvaders worked flawlessly with no issues, which I imagine to be the same for any modern Lynx game you throw at the Pocket.
Bumpy controls but excellent screen, mostly good compatibility but weird imperfections, excellent QOL and save state support unless you love the Lynx, it feels like there’s seriously a ton of good with the Analogue Pocket still, even though it has baffling issues that should have been fixed long ago, especially considering how the adapter triple pack didn’t even launch until early 2024. The D-Pad has no reason to be anything besides perfect at this point, yet they still make the D-Pad wonky. It feels like Analogue will only update this when they come outta the shadows unannounced and drop something on a whim, since otherwise you’re on your own.
…Which is probably their intention, hence OpenFPGA. This is kinda the other factor that makes a lot of people buy this thing, although it wasn’t one for me at all. Basically if you heard of a MISTER, those are giant FPGA thingies that let you play way more cores and games than say, a retroUSB AVS or Analogue Duo. It also lets you play a ton of Arcade games, which is very critical when most MAME arcade emulations are still riddled with inaccuracies, while FPGA cores tend to make them arcade-perfect. Dozens and dozens of cores are available for the MISTER project, and thus the Analogue Pocket’s openFPGA is basically a portable MISTER in that it has a bunch of cores you can throw on it that are compatible with certain games, and it will let you play those games and systems on the Pocket without a cartridge.
Obviously, this means there’s a lot of legal murkiness to it. A bunch of the systems you’d expect to use, like GB-GBA are all blocked behind BIOS files, and I can’t get them with my GBAXCart dumper. Same goes for Lynx and the Turbografx CD, among a couple of other platforms. Thankfully, some like NES, SMS, SNES, Game Gear and Genesis are all BIOS-free and easier to experiment with. This means if you want, you could say, get a homebrew game like NES’s Bobl, throw it on the FPGA core and play it right on the Analogue Pocket! A pretty neat way to expand the library, but YMMV depending on what games you’re able to purchase that way.
Though excellent homebrew titles like Alwa’s Awakening 8-Bit are available to purchase, and I say that’s more than worthy enough of giving this feature a shot, even if you don’t want to do stuff in the shadow realm to use OpenFPGA more. There’s also other various freeware/homebrew titles for easy use on OpenFPGA, like Blade Buster, Omega Blast, Gotris, and other such games, although keep in mind OpenFPGA cores will vary in features depending on the author/what limitations are present with the system, so you can’t use Save States on the Genesis core for instance, while the Game Gear one lacks any kind of screen filter option.
Overall, I found OpenFPGA to be a fun way to expand the library, but the more away from handheld gaming it took me, the more I just preferred sticking to carts. In a weirdly cynical way, while it’s clear the OpenFPGA community has a lot of passion for the cores, it also seems to me that it might just be Analogue wanting the community to do free labor for them to enhance their product in ways they are unwilling to do, especially considering one of the achievements to come out of the community has been the Analogizer, a semi-replacement for the DAC that works great, if you plan to exclusively play through OpenFPGA. For cart fanatics like me, we basically have to kick rocks due to Analogue’s ghosting on the DAC, but community-made inventions like this and the super handy Pocket Sync app are just some of the many ways the community does what Analogue won’t.
Conclusion
In conclusion, no, the Analogue Pocket is not the second coming, nor is it the best handheld ever or the perfect Game Boy. It’s a very darn good Game Boy, and a fantastic way to play GB-GBA games out of the box, but there are still too many silly issues for such a premium product in 2025. The D-Pad being wonky is just beyond unacceptable by this point, making some genres bigger headaches to play than they should be, and some games being incompatible that have no darn reason to be incompatible is just stupid, especially considering the bragging about perfect compatibility Analogue tends to go on and on about. Again, I can maybe get a hyper niche JP game not wanting to play nice, but Action Man on GBC?!? Cmon, how has that not been fixed by now?
Add in the continual ghosting on the promised DAC support, (A pretty huge deal for your product to promise a thing that everyone got screwed over on) weird errors with some of the newer adapters, and the fact it really seems like Analogue wants everyone else to do their work with post-launch support, and if you aren’t just planning on buying the adapters for a bigger library, use this as a backlog clearer, or just use this to you know, complete video games, this is not as easy of a recommendation as it should be, especially a half decade later.
The good news is the stuff the Pocket does well, it does really well on, like those outstanding LCD filters. The bad news is for every underbaked component like the D-Pad or some weird compatibility quirks, it just makes me feel like the community deserves better, and OpenFPGA can only go so far, and I’m still a little mixed on the idea of a community basically having to prop up a system that deserves better.
Still a good get for playing GB-GBA carts, and the GG adapter is what I consider a must own due to the ease of access for that library compared to wrestling with real Game Gear hardware, but maybe hold off on buying this if you only want to play a couple of games on this like Pokemon and Mario; the Analogue Pocket is only really a must-own for hardcore handheld collectors and those who want to play a lot of these games, not just a few. If only Analogue kept their promises and also fixed their D-Pad rather than make a bajillion variants of this thing, then I could have the Analogue Pocket be a slam dunk recommendation!
I give the Analogue Pocket a 7 out of 10.