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Analogue OS – Explore video game history

by Unai on 10/17/21, 4:46 AM with 65 comments

by louhike on 10/17/21, 5:40 AM
Analogue’s marketing is infuriating the retro gaming community more and more. Their products are nice but they always take a lot of time to deliver their products, even before the covid. Their marketing is always misleading, talking about « no emulation » although it is some kind emulation of the systems. It is better than software emulation as it allows better accuracy and far less input lag, but it is emulation through FPGA.
I’m quite interested in the Pocket, but if you want to jump in FPGA emulation of old computers, consoles and arcades, I’d recommend the MiSTer project which is open source, delivers constantly, do not use shitty marketing terms, has a great community and allows to play a lot of old systems already.
by Causality1 on 10/17/21, 6:07 AM
"The Library of Alexandria of video games" is not the title of the page nor does it appear on the page at all. Per the HN submission guidelines: please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
by leshokunin on 10/17/21, 7:52 AM
It’s hilarious reading the negative comments here because it’s completely out of sync with the way Analogue’s audience perceives them.
They’re seen as a high quality, craftsmanship driven shop. Their current consoles offer extremely high fidelity emulation. There’s an attention to detail that’s to the point where original hardware quirks, limitations of accessories are maintained. You can go pretty deep with the way the color palette, the pixel shapes, and the scanlines are rendered. Their current OS (for thw NT and such) feels like a file manager that could run on an NES. It’s ok. To see them invest into making it more capable, and more versatile is a great thing. You can’t get this level of service with a SNES Mini or a NES Mini. This is exciting!
by LeoPanthera on 10/17/21, 5:27 AM
Analogue is the company that trademarked the term "FPGA": https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4801:1t...
And then claim that it is some kind of magical panacea for all emulation problems: https://twitter.com/analogue/status/1449389710065946628
Which of course is wildly misleading. It's just marketing.
by noasaservice on 10/17/21, 5:31 AM
No it's not. It's just another hardware commercial grab that relies on using the real current version of Library of Alexandria - Thepiratebay.org
There's no vendor that could afford license fees to copy every game, from say, the NES, SNES, Atari, Commodore, etc. The rights are either untracable, unpurchasable, or exorbitantly priced.
It's also why Ready Player One book was so awesome, and why the movie was a pale joke... Even with Spielberg as the big name directing, there was absolutely no way to afford every right mentioned in the book. - Do you think that even the 1st quest, a D&D campaign, would be licensed reasonably by WoTC/Hasbro? And, well, it wasn't.
by nicolas_t on 10/17/21, 7:17 AM
I would not recommend Analogue at all, they deliver half baked products that fail to deliver what they promised and give non-answer when contacting support.
When they announced the NT mini noir restock, they announced it would have support for sega genesis through the jailbreak so I bought it on that basis. But when the jailbreak (which is not released directly by an "independent" party that has access to the internals and all the information needed to release them), the sega genesis support had a very weird mapping making it impossible to play most games correctly (the c button is mapped to the select button on the genesis controller from 8bitdo). Me and a few people complained to support who despite promises of looking into it did nothing at all.
If it was opensource, I could just fix it but right now I have a very expensive console that only does half of what it promised.
by stared on 10/17/21, 11:19 AM
It is not "Library of Alexandria of video games" - I felt deceived after visiting the page. It is a Steamdeck for old games. The link should be changed especially as the HN rules suggest to edit out clickbaits, not to add them.
Compare and contrast with actual collections:
- https://archive.org/details/classicpcgames
- https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games/
by WalterGR on 10/17/21, 5:22 AM
Wow that’s hard to read. Here’s an article about the subject: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/16/22722412/analogue-pocket...
by Klaster_1 on 10/17/21, 6:08 AM
Talking about “Library of Alexandria of video games”, I wonder how much video games were lost forever after Underground Gamer was shut down. Without the easy access, these games won't get as much publicity as before and crazy projects like documenting every single PC-88 game in English (kudos to Oleg) become much harder.
by ParadisoShlee on 10/17/21, 5:37 AM
MiSTER hits a similar beat, just with less marketing.
by twelvechairs on 10/17/21, 7:11 AM
The text leaves a lot to be desired.
It seems to be an OS designed to interact with FPGA chips.
Whats not explained is why this is better than using other OSs for the same goal, and why this is definitively better than using software emulation (which seems fine to me as an outisder for anything ive wanted in this space).
This is the information i need to decide if it can be 'definitive' and 'conclusive' compared to other options which is their stated design goal.
'Library of alexandria' is another red herring of copy text. A library is about providing access to information, which AFAIK the data (games here) are available in lots of places already
by em3rgent0rdr on 10/17/21, 5:45 AM
Why call it "AnalogueOS" if it is digital?
by olah_1 on 10/17/21, 7:01 AM
I thought that Analogue required the cartridge to play these old games?
How does that work with this concept of playlists and stuff?
by iamevn on 10/17/21, 6:02 AM
is there any indication of whether you can capture video off an analogue pocket? from what I can tell you need to buy the dock (which is out of stock) and capture hdmi?
by Kipters on 10/17/21, 1:30 PM
Now, if you could actually get the Pocket...