A year after it was first teased, Analog says it has completed its most complex project to date: recreating the Nintendo 64 from scratch. The Analog 3D will ship in Q1 2025 — it was originally slated for 2024 — and pre-orders begin on October 21 at $250.
Like all of the company’s machines, the Analog 3D has an FPGA (field programmable gate array) chip coded to emulate the original console at the hardware level. Analog promises support for every official N64 cartridge ever released, in all regions, with no slowdowns or inaccuracies. If it achieves this goal, the Analog 3D will be the world’s first system to fully emulate the N64, although other FPGA and software emulators are pretty close.
The company has been selling recreations of retro consoles for over a decade, starting with high-end, bespoke takes on the Neo-Geo and NES. Over time it has gradually moved toward more mass-market (though still high-end) production, with versions of the SNES, Genesis, and Game Boy all coming in around $200. All of the company’s systems support original physical media rather than ROM.
Analogue’s original unique selling point was the use of FPGA chips. Rather than using software emulation to run ROMs, Analogue programs FPGA “cores” to emulate the original console hardware, and its consoles support original game media and controllers. Compared to software emulation (especially in the early 10s when Analogue started), FPGA-based consoles are more accurate, and don’t suffer from as much input lag.
FPGA emulation has come a long way in the past decade. Where Analogue was once the only way for most people to get into the FPGA world, it now has a thriving community of developers and hardware manufacturers involved.
For example, the open-source Meister project has accurately emulated almost every video game thing ever made up to the mid-90s. And lots of smaller manufacturers are now selling FPGA hardware at very reasonable prices. The FPGBC is a good example of this: it’s a simple DIY kit that lets you build a modern Game Boy Color at a much lower cost than the Analogue Pocket.
Amid all these developments, Analogue occupies a strange space in the retro gaming community, which has evolved as an open-source, people-powered movement to preserve and play old games. It makes undeniably great hardware that doesn’t require expertise to use, but its prices are high, and its limited-run color variants of the Pocket-like console have created FOMO in the community and have been a frequent target for scalpers. Analogue is, in many ways, the Apple of the retro gaming hardware space.
With that said, it’s hard to deny that Pocket has brought more players to the retro gaming world and attracted talent to FPGA development. And if Analogue delivers on its promise here, Analogue will be another big moment for 3D video game preservation, and it could be the spark for another half decade of great achievements from the FPGA community.
Breaking the Fifth Generation Barrier
While FPGA emulation of the first few video game generations is largely a solved problem, there’s a huge leap in complexity between the fourth generation (SNES, Genesis, etc.) and the next generation.
There have been steps taken to recreate the PlayStation, Saturn, and N64 in FPGA, but there’s no core for any fifth generation console that can fully solve the puzzle. The current state of the MiSTer N64 core is quite impressive, with nearly every US game considered playable, but very few games considered running flawlessly.
So how did Analogue solve it? The studio has a talented team, but it’s significantly ahead when it comes to hardware. Analog 3D has the strongest version of the Intel Cyclone 10GX FPGA chip, with 220,000 logic elements. For reference, Mr. Project’s open-source DE-10 board has a Cyclone V FPGA with 110,000 logic elements, while the Analog Pocket’s main FPGA offers 49,000 elements.
There’s a lot more to an FPGA than its logic elements, but the numbers are illustrative: 3D’s FPGA is undoubtedly the most powerful Analog has used to date, which obviously gave it more flexibility in designing its cores.
While we can’t verify Analog’s claim of 100 percent compatibility by looking at the specification sheet, the company has a good track record of programming great FPGA cores, so chances are it gets incredibly close.
Of course, if you want to play N64 games properly, you can plug the N64 into any TV with a composite or S-video connector, or use one of the many boxes that convert those formats into the HDMI signals that modern TVs require.