The Analogue 3D, an FPGA-based Nintendo 64 , is set to open for pre-orders on October 21st, priced at $249.99. This console aims to provide a highly accurate emulation of the original N64 hardware using a powerful Altera Cyclone 10GX FPGA chip, which is the most advanced FPGA used by Analogue to date.https://Twitter.com/analogue/status/1846567706910142548Key FeaturesCompatibility: The Analogue 3D supports all official N64 cartridges from any region, promising no slowdown or inaccuracies. It features four controller ports for original N64 controllers and also supports wireless controllers via Bluetooth.Resolution and Display: It includes a bespoke 4K upscaler designed to faithfully recreate the look
If it was a hardware platform with existing support for other emulators, I’d say it still may be useful. All I’m seeing is an expensive piece of specialized hardware that retails with a single use. Because its FPGA, of course it can be reprogrammed to do whatever on the fly, but why go this route when you already have plenty of x86 or ARM software out there that already does that.
It just seems SUPER specific and singularly focused with no added benefits for the price tag is all.
FPGA is cycle accurate which requires very powerful hardware if you wanted to do it with software emulation, especially when you get to 5th gen consoles. It’s for the people that want an „end-game” setup that’s as good as original hardware, can handle multiple systems and give you much more flexibility. It doesn’t cost all that much when you compare it to original hardware, mods and scalers it would require to connect to new displays. I’m actually very surprised how cheap A64 is, expected at least twice as much.
But, if you’re not that type of crazy then playing on your own PC, Ambernic and similar stuff is good enough and super convenient.
Cycle accurate just means the FPGA runs the same cycles as the reference hardware of whatever it’s programmed to be doing. In this case, an N64.
But the point of software emulation is to skip all of that noise and be more portable in the first place. The only real reason I can think to go with FPGA in this case is 1) to sidestep lawsuits, and 2) to possibly expand functionality in the future.
It might seem like an overkill but cycle accurate emulation is in many ways easier, just way less performant. Back in the day devs wrote software in a way that would leverage different timings between different pieces of hardware to achieve things that wouldn’t be possible otherwise like full screen parallax scrolling on Gameboy. Software emulators have to identify those cases and implement workarounds for them. Some edge cases are unresolved for years leading to bugs of varying severity. You can see a rundown of such cases on Analogue Pocket in this video.