Game designer Analogue has excited retro players by announcing its remake of the Nintendo 64 console will be released early next year.
The US console maker is best known for making the Pocket, a modern handheld device capable of playing Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Sega Game Gear, Atari Lynx and even Neo Geo Pocket games. Now it is focusing on the 64-bit era with the Analogue 3D.
This home console looks much like the original Nintendo 64 and Analogue says it can play “every original N64 game ever made”. You slot the actual game cartridges in the Analogue 3D cartridge slot. This is no mini console where such a slot is just for show.
Why not just buy an actual N64? The Analogue 3D outputs at 4K resolution and has modes to make games look like you are playing them on a classic CRT TV, which you don’t usually get with today’s OLED displays and LCDs.
The Analogue 3D also has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, letting you connect an 8BitDo 64 Controller co-developed between the two companies. Up to four of these gamepads can be connected wirelessly for multiplayer gaming.
You can also plug your old N64 gamepads into the ports on the front of the console.
The Analogue 3D is a next-level retro console because it uses a technique called FPGA, a field-programmable gate array. This effectively lets it recreate the hardware of the original Nintendo 64.
Other retro consoles use software emulation, which is typically much less accurate. The potential bad news is the Analogue 64 is likely to play those old N64 games just as they ran in the 1990s.
Return to titles like Turok 2 or Goldeneye in 2024 and you’ll realise quite how bad the frame rates were on the N64 by modern standards. It was an ambitious console when released in the UK in 1997.
There’s some hope among retro circles that Analogue may add an overclocked turbo mode to the Analogue 3D, but the manufacturer has not confirmed this.
Then there’s the price. An Analogue 3D costs $249 (£192). That’s not too bad, but it is not what we’ll pay in the UK.
First, the gamepads are separate and cost $40 (£31) each. Then there are shipping costs, which are expected to be $60 (£46) given the test orders we tried. And this doesn’t include VAT at 20 per cent or customs charges.
The Analogue 3D should sell out rapidly regardless, so jump on the pre-order quickly if you want to revisit your nineties gaming memories. This opens at 4pm on Monday, October 21, and you can choose a white or black console when ordering.
