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?
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?