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Technology

The Analogue Pocket Just Got Its Long-Awaited Jailbreak

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Image: Analogue / Kotaku / Se_vector (Shutterstock)

Analogue Co.’s Pocket has always turned heads: first for being the most authentic-seeming Game Boy replacement ever announced, then for taking an extraordinary length of time to finally come out. But come out it did, and it was pretty good. For some, its biggest drawback was that it required old, increasingly expensive physical cartridges to play games, as (for the most part) it couldn’t just load convenient ROM files. The Pocket really needed something the kids call a “jailbreak,” at least if it was going to fulfill the fantasy of being the ultimate Game Boy device. Today, that jailbreak just slipped in the side door.

A little place-setting: When the Pocket finally shipped last December, it had only the most barebones operating system, and lacked many of the system’s long-promised features, like save states that backed up your game progress. (Analogue also didn’t release the originally announced Atari Lynx, Neo Geo Pocket, or TurboGrafx-16 cart adapters.) Early adopters, glad as they were to have their uber Game Boys with beautiful retina-quality screens, realized it’d be quite some time before the device in their hands was actually finished.

The same was true for would-be developers eager to make the new machine do fun new stuff. The Pocket contains two field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which programmers can reconfigure to closely approximate the hardware of another device. They are wonderful for simulating classic video game systems, and hobbyist developers could surely put them to great use, perhaps by developing new FPGA cores—meaning software that tells the FPGAs how to configure themselves—to simulate even more consoles. But that feature was delayed too.

Fast forward to today. At 8:01 a.m. PT Analogue finally released a new version of the Pocket’s Analogue OS. Today’s Analogue OS v1.1 beta adds the long-promised “Library” and “Memories” features; the first displays information about games you insert, the second is basically save states. v1.1 also finally opens the system up to developers, under the moniker “openFPGA.” As an example of what hobbyists can accomplish with the newly unlocked FPGAs, Analogue released an openFPGA core that simulates Spacewar!, one of the first video games. Neat.

And that was it. A nice and necessary update, but it wasn’t the jailbreak many folks’d been hoping for, either. See you in another six months! (Actually, Analogue being Analogue, more likely eight.)

But then.

Some three hours later at 11:23 a.m., a Github account called Spiritualized1997, created less than 24 hours before, uploaded a repository called openFPGA-GBA; one minute later, it uploaded another called openFPGA-GB-GBC. Each repository contained a single downloadable file. “To play Game Boy Advance on your Pocket follow these instructions,” said the instructions accompanying the GBA repository, outlining five steps to install a v1.0.0 Spiritualized1997 GBA core on the Pocket and get it running ROM files. The second repository offered similar instructions, but for a core that ran Game Boy and Game Boy Color ROMs.

So to recap: Today Analogue Pocket got the ability to run third-party FPGA cores. Three hours and 22 minutes later the Pocket’s two most popular supported handhelds mysteriously received new, third-party FPGA cores that could Do The Thing that everyone’s wanted the Pocket to do since it came out: load games from ROM files stored on a microSD card. Is this…is this finally the jailbreak?

Yes, yes it is. Or rather, the jailbreak’s finally started, because today’s two v1.0.0 Nintendo cores are just the first wave of what is clearly going to be a longer, more sustained rollout.

So what is happening here? Who is Spiritualized1997, and how the hell did they develop and release GBA and GB/GBC cores for the Analogue Pocket just three or so hours after today’s Analogue OS v1.1 beta release made running such things possible? Why is the account so new?

Most observers’ theory—which, to be clear, Kotaku cannot confirm—is that Spiritualized1997 is Kevin “Kevtris” Horton, a legend in the emulation scene and the FPGA emulation guru behind all of Analogue’s FPGA-based game machines. He’s worked on the Analogue NT mini (which played 8-bit NES games), the Super NT (SNES games), the Mega Sg (Sega Genesis games), and of course the Pocket.

Kevtris checks in on the popular Classic Gaming Discord today about 40 minutes after the two unexpected FPGA cores were uploaded.
Screenshot: Kotaku

Horton has a history (you’re now thinking of a Dr. Seuss book) of releasing unofficial “jailbreak” firmware for the Analogue Co. consoles he’s helped develop, starting back in 2017 when he uploaded the first jailbreak firmware for the NT mini. “The Core Store is officially open for business!” he wrote on the AtariAge forum, referring to the potential to make the NT mini run games from a variety of systems, when until then it had only played 8-bit Nintendo games loaded off of physical cartridges.

In case that left any doubt, he added, “Yes, this means that it runs ROMs now!”

And that’s how it’s gone for all the Analogue consoles since. Horton got a little more discreet after the NT mini jailbreak, instead releasing his jailbreak firmwares through intermediaries like emulation scene mover-and-shaker Smokemonster. But folks in the scene, with a wink and a nod, understand where these popular, hardware-enhancing bits of software really come from. (Prior Analogue consoles have been closed platforms, so who else could have made them?)

That’s why many people considered it a given that the Analogue Pocket’s wonderful hardware would itself get liberated to play games from ROM files. It’s been a long eight months, but today’s surprise Spiritualized1997 FPGA cores are pretty much exactly what Pocket owners wanted, just in a slightly different form than usual—discrete FPGA cores loadable through the Pocket’s new openFPGA feature. That’s made this “jailbreak” seem a little more subtle than usual. It’s not a firmware replacement, but just alternate cores you run off the microSD card. The end result is exactly the same, though.

But again, this is just the start of a longer jailbreak process that will play out over the coming months. After all, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance are just three of the handhelds people want to play on Pocket, not to mention folks clamoring for it to support TV-based consoles like Genesis and SNES. The Spiritualized1997 FPGA cores, both at just v1.0.0, are also missing a few features enjoyed by the Pocket’s official built-in cores, most notably screen filters. These and further enhancements are coming; the missing filters are apparently just because the openFPGA API is still immature.

Spiritualized1997, who only joined Github yesterday, is a very helpful person.
Screenshot: Kotaku

Spiritualized1997, whoever they may be, is also being quite active on Reddit. One user bemoaned the lack of a Sega Game Gear core, to which Spiritualized1997 replied, “coming soon.” This seemingly supernaturally helpful individual also released an 80MB archive containing 6,959 title screen images of Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and Game Gear games that are in, wouldn’t you know it, exactly the special file format that the Pocket’s new “Library” feature expects. So now you know how to make your Library look pretty.

“This is fantastic! Finally the Pocket awakens from its deep slumber,” said a Reddit user in response to news of the two new FPGA cores. “I haven’t powered on mine [in] months!”

“Today has been a roller coaster.” said another. “Sincerely, thanks!”

So while the heavens didn’t part and there was no neon sign flashing “the jailbreak is here!”, make no mistake, on July 29, 2022 the Analogue Pocket finally got the key feature owners have desired since December. But this jailbreak isn’t once and done; this is slow and steady, and now that the pump is primed, more ROM-friendly cores will come with time. Game Gear first, seemingly.

Kotaku reached out to Analogue Co. for comment.

At the end of today’s Analogue OS v1.1 announcement, the company tweeted, “Analogue does not support or endorse the unauthorized use or distribution of material protected by copyright or other intellectual property rights.”

 



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Technology

Analogue Pocket’s first major update arrives in July

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The Analogue Pocket is finally getting some of the important feature updates promised at launch. As The Verge notes, Analogue has promised a Pocket OS 1.1 beta in July that will add the expected Library, Memories and FPGA development features. You can expect advancements to arrive “regularly” after that, according to the company.

Library will amount to an encyclopedia for classic games. Insert a cartridge and you’ll ideally learn everything about your specific copy of a game, including play guides and publisher details. Memories, meanwhile, lets you create save states and screenshots. Although Analogue hasn’t fully explained the development expansion, this will likely let programmers use the Pocket’s second FPGA. They’ll have access to the OS, hardware and features like Memories.

There’s no mention of why 1.1 is taking so long. However, the delay was substantial. Analogue said in December that Library and Memories would be ready in January, but they’re now appearing several months later in a rough form. Not that the wait will matter if you aren’t already an owner. New pre-orders won’t get their Pockets until 2023, so this is is more a kindness to early adopters than anything else.

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Technology

Analogue Pocket’s big 1.1 update is finally coming in July, as a beta

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Analogue Pocket’s long-awaited 1.1 update will finally be arriving in July, Analogue announced in a short blog post on Friday.

The Analogue Pocket OS v1.1 release will include beta versions of the Library, Memories, and FPGA development features, according to the blog post. You can read more about the first two features in our article from October; the Library will be a huge historical archive about retro games, while Memories will let you capture and load save states as well as capture screenshots.

It seems like the development feature will allow developers to take advantage of the Analogue’s second FPGA (field-programmable gate array). “Pocket is designed to be as easy as possible to develop and port FPGA cores to,” Analogue says on its website. “We added a second dedicated FPGA just for developers to develop and port their own cores. Developers will be able to interface with Analogue OS: Library, Memories, and Tools. And to Pocket hardware, I/O’s and scalers.”

At the time of the retro handheld’s December launch, Analogue told Polygon that the update would be arriving in January, but now, the company is saying a beta of the update is set to arrive six months later. It’s not clear what the holdup has been or when Analogue expects to bring 1.1 to be out of beta. Analogue CEO and founder Christopher Taber didn’t immediately reply to requests for clarification.

Even without the features arriving with v1.1, the Analogue Pocket is still an impressive device, with my colleague Andrew Webster saying that “the Pocket breathes new life into old games by showing them at their very best” in his review. But if you don’t already have one of the handhelds, you might be waiting a while to get it. The next set of preorders (Group B) is scheduled to arrive in Q4, and if you preorder a Pocket right now, you won’t get it until sometime in 2023.

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Technology

The Analogue Pocket Has Game Boy Camera Fans Taken Care Of

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Photo: Andrew Liszewski – Gizmodo

If you owned a Game Boy, there’s a good chance the Game Boy Camera was your first digital camera. It was cheap, it was easy to use, and the 2-bit pixelated images it captured had an undeniable charm. For the first time in nearly 23 years there’s finally going to be an easy way to get those digital pics onto other devices—if you’re lucky enough to get your hands on the Analogue Pocket.

The $90 Game Boy Camera debuted back in 1998, and it was roughly the cost of the Game Boy itself. The camera slotted into the back of the handheld console, turning it into a full-fledged digital camera. Compared to even the other digital cameras available at the time, the Game Boy Camera’s specs were crude at best. Inside the swiveling lens that stuck up over the top of the Game Boy was a 128 x 128-pixel CMOS sensor that actually cropped images even smaller, to 128 x 112 pixels in just four shades of gray. That works out to 0.001434 megapixels.

With the ability to add fun effects to photos—decades before that would be a common feature on smartphones—and even basic stop-motion photography tools, the Game Boy Camera was still extremely popular. Even today, lo-fi photography fans do things like photograph the moon with it, or use old film photography tricks to produce color images.

Being a modern day Game Boy Camera photographer isn’t easy, though, with the most challenging workflow issue being actually getting digital copies of your shots off of the accessory, of which the camera can only store a handful. Nintendo’s solution was a link port connected thermal printer that turned Game Boy Camera photos into thumbnail-sized stickers, but getting those shots onto another device has long been a pain. Talented hardware hackers have come up with ways to connect the Game Boy Camera to modern printers, and even elaborate devices that wirelessly transfer those images to a smartphone, but there’s finally a much easier solution.

The Analogue Pocket, which officially started shipping this week, uses a custom chip inside to perfectly play any official Game Boy cartridge in existence, including the Game Boy Camera. The Pocket also features a microSD card slot that facilitates firmware updates as well as the ability to share game save files eventually, but the company has also revealed to Gizmodo that version 1.1 of the Pocket’s operating system, Analogue OS, will allow images from the Game Boy Camera to be easily retrieved through the memory card so they can be transferred to other devices.

It won’t be as effortless as wirelessly transferring images between smartphones—you’ll need to physically sneakernet that microSD card to another device—but it will be a solution that’s considerably more straightforward than what Game Boy Camera enthusiasts have had to rely on so far—custom link port adapters and special software to extract imagery. Currently, our Analogue Pocket review unit is running Analogue OS version 1.0, and while there’s no specific timeline for when version 1.1 will be available, it hopefully won’t be that far off as Pockets start arriving to those who preordered it a year ago.

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Technology

Analogue Pocket December 14 Orders Reopen

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Analogue is now reopening orders for its highly coveted Pocket handheld console.

Taking to Twitter to announce the news, the company is now going to take fresh orders started December 14, saying “It is our goal for everyone who wants a Pocket to be able to secure an order.” Though you’ll be able to put in orders tomorrow, it’ll still be on a first-come-first-serve basis split into three main groups. Group A will receive their Pockets in Q1 of 2022, with group B getting theirs in Q4 of the same year. Finally, Group C will receive their orders sometime in 2023.

On top of reopening orders, Analogue has also announced a price increase for the device. Originally at $200 USD, the handheld will now go for $220 USD “due to industry-wide component price increases,” although all of its other accessories will remain at the same price.

For those interested, you’ll be able to pre-order your Pocket over on Analogue’s website starting tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. PST (11 a.m. EDT).

Elsewhere in gaming, Halo Infinite is getting a dedicated Slayer playlist this week.



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Technology

Analogue Pocket Preorders Will Reopen Next Week, But at a Higher Price

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Analogue has announced that preorders for the Pocket – its long-awaited handheld game console – will reopen on December 14 at 8am PT/11am ET/7pm GMT with a higher price.

Analogue announced the news in a blog post, saying that “due to industry wide component price increases, the price of Pocket is now $219. All other Pocket accessories will remain the same price.” Before this price hike, the Analogue Pocket retailed for $199.

Those who are lucky enough to secure a preorder this time around – the first batch sold out in 15 minutes – will fall into one of three fulfilment groups. This is to help ensure that “everyone who wants a Pocket will be able to secure an order.”

Group A currently has an estimated shipping date of Q1 2022, Group B’s is Q4 2022, and Group C’s is 2023. These fulfilment groups are assigned on “a first-come first-serve basis”, and “your order status will be updated a few days after you place your order to reflect what fulfilment group you are in.”

Analogue is limiting orders to 2 Pockets per customer, and it says this “system is put in place due to ongoing global supply constraint.” Additionally, orders may be cancelled at any time for a full refund before they are shipped.

Analogue Pocket – Gameplay Images

All current preorders are still on track to ship out on Monday, December 13, and Analogue has even upgraded all orders to FedEx 2-day so customers will get their orders as “quickly as possible.”

The Analogue Pocket was originally announced in 2019 and allows users to play three generations of Game Boy games and another of other handheld games using adapters. It also can display games at 10 times the resolution of the originals and features its own music and game design software.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.



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Technology

How to Use a Game Boy Camera as Your Webcam

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Remember that time your parents asked you to mow the lawn and you did such a terrible job they never asked you again? The same approach can work with coworkers or friends inviting you to endless video calls when you show up as a low-resolution, grainy, black and white video stream courtesy of the Game Boy Camera.

As limited as the Game Boy Camera’s capabilities were (it used a 128×128-pixel CMOS sensor cropped to 128×112-pixels that was limited to just four shades of gray) for a lot of kids in the late ‘90s it was their first digital camera at a time when that technology was prohibitively expensive. The images it captured were awful, even for 1998, and they were trapped in the Game Boy unless you also bought a tiny thermal printer peripheral, but through user-friendly software Nintendo made it all work, and 23 years later, there are enthusiasts who still like to shoot with the Game Boy Camera and take advantage of its lo-fi aesthetic.

The retro enthusiasts behind the YouTube channel, RetroGameCouch, found yet another use for the Game Boy Camera: as an emergency webcam if all of your other streaming hardware suddenly stops working. It brings the retro charm of the accessory to everything from Microsoft Teams, to Zoom, to even Twitch if you use the platform to stream retro games, and making it work with a modern PC or laptop isn’t terribly difficult if you have the proper hardware.

The first thing you need, besides a working Game Boy Camera itself, is either the Super Game Boy cartridge that Nintendo released for the Super Nintendo or the Game Boy Player for the GameCube. Both devices allow Game Boy cartridges to be played on a TV, or, in this case, provide a video stream from the Game Boy Camera’s live preview.

If you’re using either of those original Nintendo consoles you’ll need to add a device that converts an old-school composite or component video signal to HDMI, or you can opt for modernized equivalents, like the Analogue Super Nt, that natively features HDMI out and provides a much cleaner and sharper signal. The last piece of the puzzle is a simple HDMI to USB capture card which is now no larger than a USB flash drive and can be found online for less than $20. These turn the video signal from the console into a webcam feed that can be accessed by the myriad of video conferencing apps available for Windows or macOS.

You’ll need a separate mic if you want people to hear you because the Game Boy Camera had no audio capabilities at all, but that should be all you’ll need to subject your friends and colleagues to one of the worst video call experiences they’ve ever had. Hopefully, they won’t ever come back for seconds.

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Technology

Analogue Pocket portable console delayed again, this time until October

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The Analogue Pocket, a $199 do-everything retro portable console capable of playing Game Boy, Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color and Atari Lynx games from their original cartridges, has been delayed again. It was originally scheduled for release in 2020, but then and now, supply chain challenges have pushed the small company to push back its plans.

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Analogue is offering full refunds to anyone who already pre-ordered a system and isn’t willing to wait until October, assuming the system is released then. According to the company’s blog post, “There have been sudden and severe electrical component shortages as well as logistical issues leading to a domino effect of challenges for nearly everyone in the industry.” Separately, it tweeted that the Super Nt system will be restocked in April, with Mega SG and DAC following shortly after. 2021 could still be a great year for alternative consoles, — as long as the worldwide chip shortage doesn’t interfere.

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Science

Swirling Vortex of Bathtub Water Reveals an Elusive Mechanism of Black Hole Physics

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When a black hole is active, we tend to focus on the effect it has on the material it’s slurping up. It makes sense to do so; black holes themselves are difficult to probe. But the interaction between the black hole and the material should have an effect on the black hole, too – as it gains material, it should also gain in mass.

 

Such small feedback responses – especially ones previously ignored as trivial – are known as backreactions, and scientists have just observed an analogue of one that’s specific to black holes, and which can be seen in water swirling down a drain.

It’s a detection that could help study black hole phenomena that are too subtle for our current instruments, such as the Hawking radiation that is thought to be emitted by black holes. This is a theoretical type of black-body radiation that would eventually – after a very, very long time – see a black hole completely evaporate, provided it was not growing at all.

In order to study cosmic objects in finer detail than we can across the vast distances of space, scaled-down versions, or analogues, can be created in a lab. Like, for instance, a recent experiment to replicate white dwarf core pressures.

Black hole analogues are an excellent way to find out more about these enigmatic objects, and different kinds can help reveal their secrets in multiple ways.

Optical fibre and Bose-Einstein condensates have both been used to learn more about Hawking radiation. But one of the simplest has to do with how black holes feed: the draining bathtub vortex.

 

Black hole accretion can be compared with water swirling down a drain. Treating matter as a ripple in a field, the water can stand in for spacetime itself, or a field rippling with quantum activity.

Measuring the ripples responses as the water vanishes down a swirling drain might have something to say about waves of energy disappearing into a black hole.

A bathtub vortex black hole analogue. (The University of Nottingham)

From such analogues, we’ve learnt a lot about the effect of black holes on the space and material around them. But with an external water pump keeping the background of the system steady, it was unclear whether a water black hole analogue would have the freedom to be able to react to waves.

This set of experiments is the first time a draining bathtub vortex has demonstrated an effect on the black hole itself.

“We have demonstrated that analogue black holes, like their gravitational counterparts, are intrinsically backreacting systems,” said physicist Sam Patrick of the University of Nottingham in the UK.

“We showed that waves moving in a draining bathtub push water down the plug hole, modifying significantly the drain speed and consequently changing the effective gravitational pull of the analogue black hole.”

 

When waves were sent rippling into the system towards the drain, they pushed extra water in, accelerating the “accretion” process so significantly that the water levels in the tub dropped noticeably, even while a pump maintained the same level of water going in.

This change in the water level corresponds to a change in the properties of the black hole, the researchers said.

This could be extremely useful information, partially because an increase in mass changes the gravitational strength of a black hole – it changes the way the black hole warps its surrounding spacetime, as well as the effect the black hole has on the accretion disc. In addition, it offers a new way to study how waves can affect black hole dynamics.

“What was really striking for us is that the backreaction is large enough that it causes the water height across the entire system to drop so much that you can see it by eye! This was really unexpected,” Patrick said.

“Our study paves the way to experimentally probing interactions between waves and the spacetimes they move through. For example, this type of interaction will be crucial for investigating black hole evaporation in the laboratory.”

The team’s research has been published in Physical Review Letters.

 

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