First-time poster, long-time reader. I created a site that isn’t monetized to report on interesting tech and gaming, covering news and reviews, and wanted to share this post as I’m a huge fan of retro gaming and would love to see the Game Bub succeed. Rest assured, although this may appear to be self-promotion, I’m not earning anything from the site; it is completely ad-free.
Back to the subject at hand. We already have a few portrait handhelds that can play physical Game Boy carts, but we still don’t have one that plays landscape. There are rumors that Modretro will make a GBA handheld, but so far, there’s no news on that front. In comes the Game Bub, which is still in crowdfunding, but it does appear a manufacturer has been secured. Hopefully the project finds enough funding to get made, cause I would love to add the Game Bub to my collection.
Not only is it open source, it can play physical carts, which is a big deal to collectors like me, as I prefer single carts over flash carts. Of course, it has an SD slot, so you won’t even need a flash cart if you don’t want to use one.
I can’t be alone in wanting to see this funded, right? We absolutely need an FPGA handheld with a 3:2 screen for GBA.
Why use a FPGA? For the price of the chip (113€) you could get an entire SBC that has more storage, voltage regulation and protection, 3.3V or 5V IO and linux.
Then you’re not in the target group.
Can someone explain to me who the target group is tho? I understand FPGAs have a larger potential of emulating hardware fast. But it’s not like the chip designs for these old consoles are open source. So FPGAs are usually not cycle accurate either.
The same kind of pretentious person that says they can feel the difference of 1ms of input lag, or hear the difference between 320kbps audio and 1411kbps. You know, an elitist.
More seriously, people can still use their physical copies on a console that can easily connect to modern display technology. But at the same time, that physical media will eventually deteriorate to an unusable degree and FPGA users will be right back to where they started. That is perhaps the singular benefit of going digital for retro emulation. As long as copies are made on new media, they cannot become unusable.
Even someone who never played a video game can see and feel a difference between, say, an Analogue Pocket and some generic SBC inside a Game Boy-esqe chassis. This same person, or you apparantly and me, will not automatically be willing to pay extra for that. It’s boutique.
People who’d also by hardware by Analogue.
Yeah I don’t get it either. I work in aviation and we use fpgas so we can do field upgrades since physical hw changes are not that common in the industry. None of these handhels look like they support fpga image updates. My only guess is that they dont sell enough volume to make ASICs due to economies of scale.
What makes this better than the Analogue Pocket?
It’s all about the screen ratio. The Pocket is 10:9, same as the original Game Boy. This way all Game Boy and Game Boy Color games perfectly fit the screen. The Pocket can play GBA, sure, but GBA was 3:2, so it’s heavily letterboxed on the Pocket. The Game Bub is a 3:2 screen, while using similar underlying tech of FPGA. Basically, the Game Bub is the right landscape layout and right screen ratio to best play GBA games.
huh, neat.
I can see that being a draw for enough people to own both
Oh for sure. Heck, I have all 3 black Analogue Pockets, and a couple colors of the Chromatic too. I love me some dedicated hardware. But the modded Game Boys just aren’t cutting it with their buzzing sound, I want perfected dedicated hardware with backlit screens.
Does anyone else detect the faint smell of GPT in this post, or am I just jumping at shadows again?
Jumping for sure. Sucks everyone is so paranoid these days, but it’s also easy to understand why. Rest assured, everything on the site is written and edited by humans, and I wrote this post on Lemmy.
From what I can tell some key giveaways are excessive use of emdashes and emoji in lists. LinkedIn is a perfect example of everyone using AI.
But yeah, I recently launched my site in retaliation to all the slop out there (more about that here), as I’m just as sick of it as everyone else, maybe moreso because it’s destroying the field I work in while decimating the careers of many friends and coworkers.
The only AI that touches the site is in place of stock photos and logos, and that’s simply because the site isn’t monetized and doesn’t make any money. Me and the crew would rather put our focus into creating high-quality content, which means recording our own videos and taking our own images of products (we only review products we’ve actually hand tested), as well as writing our own words.
We don’t want to regurgitate news in a rush like the slop shops; we have no interest in writing endless affiliated bullshit recommending products a writer has never used. We want to dig in and report the finer details, the stuff other sites won’t cover because they think their audience are idiots that need everything dumbed down. And that’s the point of opening an independent site, one owned by the writers; we are free to do the job as we see fit, and that means doing it with integrity.
Thanks for the candid reply.
I utterly despise that it’s hard to tell the difference now.
Same, I feel ya, and like I said, can’t blame ya. It’s a real shitshow out there, hard to tell what is real anymore and what’s bots.
Why not use a Raspberry Pi Zero?
