I have a love hate with analogue. They undoubtedly make really excellent products, and I absolutely adore my pocket. However they really lean into the fomo of their stuff. They make very few units, and you have to be ready to go when they drop more product most of the time. I will say though the price of this is a lot lower than I expected. And while you shouldn’t count on it, every analogue system has gotten some form of ability to play roms from other systems (whether it’s built into the OS (not happening for the 3D) or a “jailbreak” is released by basically an employee of analogue).
Analogue stuff is good if you have cartridges you want to play, but at this point, with the recent release of Taki Udon’s cheap Mister Pi (https://retroremake.co/pages/store), I think Mister is the way to go. It’s an open source project as opposed to analogue’s implementation. The issue with Mister was you needed a pretty expensive DE10 Nano board to utilize it. Now you can get one of these new boards for only $100 (if you can get your hands on them. Only 2 batches have been sold so far and they sell out quick). Plus Taki is planning on using this new board to make a handheld Mister which I’m super stoked for.
I can’t fault them for not making such a niche product at a large enough scale to make them readily available and cheap. I know we’ve become accustomed to that from other larger companies, but for a small company, that’s either very risky or just not an option. So they just design cool stuff, make just enough so that they know they can safely sell them all and thus make a predictable ROI, and move onto the next cool thing. No pressure for growth or satisfying every potential customer. Sounds like the dream.
That’s super fair and I agree for the most part. Though it’s hard to be super enthusiastic about it when they focus on a plethora of super limited edition color ways for the pocket instead of keeping the base one in stock and completely abandoning DAC support which they promised a while ago (and recently scrubbed all mention of on their site)
I have a love hate with analogue. They undoubtedly make really excellent products, and I absolutely adore my pocket. However they really lean into the fomo of their stuff. They make very few units, and you have to be ready to go when they drop more product most of the time. I will say though the price of this is a lot lower than I expected. And while you shouldn’t count on it, every analogue system has gotten some form of ability to play roms from other systems (whether it’s built into the OS (not happening for the 3D) or a “jailbreak” is released by basically an employee of analogue).
Analogue stuff is good if you have cartridges you want to play, but at this point, with the recent release of Taki Udon’s cheap Mister Pi (https://retroremake.co/pages/store), I think Mister is the way to go. It’s an open source project as opposed to analogue’s implementation. The issue with Mister was you needed a pretty expensive DE10 Nano board to utilize it. Now you can get one of these new boards for only $100 (if you can get your hands on them. Only 2 batches have been sold so far and they sell out quick). Plus Taki is planning on using this new board to make a handheld Mister which I’m super stoked for.
I can’t fault them for not making such a niche product at a large enough scale to make them readily available and cheap. I know we’ve become accustomed to that from other larger companies, but for a small company, that’s either very risky or just not an option. So they just design cool stuff, make just enough so that they know they can safely sell them all and thus make a predictable ROI, and move onto the next cool thing. No pressure for growth or satisfying every potential customer. Sounds like the dream.
That’s super fair and I agree for the most part. Though it’s hard to be super enthusiastic about it when they focus on a plethora of super limited edition color ways for the pocket instead of keeping the base one in stock and completely abandoning DAC support which they promised a while ago (and recently scrubbed all mention of on their site)