The Analogue Pocket has benefitted from a flood of openFPGA cores over the past few months, turning the system into a portable retro gaming dream.
However, a few people have bemoaned the fact that some of the Analogue Pocket's most appealing features – screen filters, save states and the ability to 'sleep' and 'wake' the system at any point – aren't available in these 'unofficial' cores.
It looks like that might be set to change, as Adam Gastineau – who ported the NES and SNES cores to the Pocket – has just revealed that a new version of the NES core is available which comes with both save state support and the ability to wake the Pocket and resume where you left off previously. You can download it here.
Gastineau explains that this feature didn't come easily. "This was a huge effort building and debugging the interface with the Pocket," he says. "I estimate I spent over a 100 hours trying to figure out how to make it work and what went wrong. Besides my ever-improving implementation and tests, the problem ended up being a single line of code..."
The question now is, can these functions be added to other openFPGA cores? Gastineau admits it's quite a bit of work:
Given that each is unique and quite complex, it might take longer than you'd think – but we're keeping our fingers crossed regardless.