I’m very interested in this system because of some nostalgia around Bonk’s Adventure and Altered Beast but how is this product sustainable? If it doesn’t work by running ROMs and requires original game disks/cartridges, how can you play these games? Are there enough of these old disks for this to be worthwhile for them to stake a business on this console, especially at $250/unit? Is someone producing new game disks that work on this? Can you make your own game disks?
Very valid questions. There are a lot of collectors out there with working games, but non-working systems. I would say they’re half of the target audience.
The other half of the audience seems to be the people who will buy it and hope that a jailbreak comes out allowing the loading of ROMs from external media. That’s been common on this company’s products for a while, though as I’ve never owned anything from them, I can’t say it’s always happened.
I have a MiSTer FPGA computer, and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying PCE/TG16/CD/SG for a while in it now, but of course I don’t care about loading games from original media.
First, I think products like this are mainly geared towards the hardcore audience who already owns a lot of these physical games. A lot of those people are already spending a lot of money on things like mods, upscalers and CRTs, making HD-ready systems like this relatively reasonable price-wise. Retro gaming can be an expensive hobby if you start going down the rabbit hole of owning a bunch of real carts and physical gear to make them play as nicely as possible.
Second, and granted this is a bit iffy, a lot of these Analogue devices have un/official "jailbreak" patches that expand the possibility beyond just physical carts. (They don't really advertise this a lot, presumably for legal reasons...? I'm not totally sure.)
I have their FPGA SNES, the SuperNT, and I use it to play both the physical carts that I own as well as my collection of SNES roms via the jailbreak firmware. I also have an FPGA NES called the RetroUSB AVS that I have equipped with an everdrive. In both cases I did the math and found that buying these systems is still a more affordable alternative to getting into things like RGB modding authentic hardware and buying a HD upscaler to play on a modern TV.
Without a doubt, the best bang for buck in the FPGA realm is the MiSTer, which of course is still much more expensive than software emulation.
That just doesn’t seem like a big enough audience to me. If you need the ROMs and jailbreaking in order to be able to use this, why wouldn’t you just play with the ROMs on a normal PC?
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