Is it just the Pocket filter without depth? I remember seeing an effort to emulate the raised pixel look on the DMG filter in the DF Retro review:
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This image is actually pretty flattering. I imagine that the grid on the Analogue Pocket is an integer scale?
It would be cool if also, like on the 3DS’s emulation of GB and GBC games, it offered a native res mode with borders (even if it results in a postage stamp-sized image).
Do you mean the original GB Filter in your post?
The DMG filter is pretty good! Got round to using it today, played a lot of Revenge of the Gator. While it’s still a bit too sharp it does a good job adding depth to the image.
Unfortunately my Game Boy Color’s screen seems to have issues, I think the ribbon cable must have become detached somehow. I get audio but I get a very jumbled image. I guess it was bound to happen at some point because I remember dropping this system into the toilet(!) back in the late 90s!
So I don’t have any direct comparisons. But based on what I remember from the games, at least, it fares much better than the GBA filter. Gold colours (such as in Wario Land 3’s logo) appear a bit too yellow, but the more limited palette makes it less of an issue.
Also what’s interesting is they seem to be rendering each pixel at the RGB subpixel level, which is just what I wanted to see:
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John from Digital Foundry doesn’t seem to value colour accuracy that strongly anyway, but it’s a shame he didn’t try to test for it.
The Analogue Pocket certainly comes into its own when the colour accuracy issues don’t harm the games, at least. And some developers clearly didn’t take into account the original GBA screens at all - Astro Boy Omega Factor looks far, far too undersaturated even on an original AGB-001, so I appreciate the option to play it with the AGS-101 colours…
…but I still wonder whether I’ll be using this over my Game Boy Micro after the novelty wears off. Particularly when travelling. It’s a beautiful, well engineered device, but it’s almost over-engineered for purpose. It’s too big and heavy to comfortably fit in one of my pockets, and the cartridge slot position, next to the shoulders, is certainly an issue with action-heavy GBA games that rely on muscle memory with those shoulder buttons.
@D.Lo Quick question - in Motorcross Maniacs 2/Crazy Bikers, what do the “!” Panels mean? I usually see them next to a clockwise or anticlockwise sign, almost as if they change the course or something, but I can’t trigger anything and end up on a very slow route…
Like, roadsigns? Off the top of my head it’s a prompt to nitro?
Here’s sort of a comparison image I took (the lighting conditions are always a bit hard to capture with a non-backlit screen. Blues and reds will obviously be more saturated on a backlit screen. But take a look at the status bar at the top of your image vs the bottom of my GBC - it’s somewhat close. A little more yellow than “off white” of my image, but not crushingly so.
I can grab some more screenshots later if you want to make like-for-like comparisons (depending on what games you have). I have two OEM non-modified GBC systems and they are virtually identical to each other. So I don’t think there was as much variance in calibration that there was with GBA models over the years.
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Thanks! My shot was from Oracle of Seasons but it’s probably identical due to the sheer amount of asset reuse in that game.
If you could take some shots that would be great. No hurry, whenever you find time. Off the top of my head, my clear carts include Wario Land 3, Pokemon Puzzle Collection, Pokemon Crystal, Game Boy Wars 3, Super Mario Bros Deluxe, Crazy Castle 4 and Crazy Bikers. I regret selling Dragon Warrior 3 now!
You raise a good point about the backlight potentially saturating some of these colours beyond the specs of the panel - it’s not something I had considered since the AGS-101 uses a DS Lite screen and I haven’t looked into backlit AGB-001s using the same display.
I’ll give it another go, it just seems odd since there are a lot of other places in the levels where you’re screwed if you don’t Nitro!
The Oracle games have different color status bar than Link’s Awakening. 
It’s these ones - I can’t clear course 4 because I always run out of gas and there are loop de loops which are inaccessible here!
Ah. Hit down when driving over it. It’s a launcher.
'Doh! I tried hitting up and gave up after that since the other buttons didn’t work. Nothing about it in the manual either!
Some DMG filter shots from the Analogue Pocket.
How accurate are these - the Pocket filter is basically the same thing but with grey instead of green hues.
The Analogue Pocket filters look too crisp to me. The cutscenes in Snow Bros have this incredible antialiased soft text on actual hardware but it looks like a mess of pixels here:
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Unfortunately, it feels like that is always going to happen on a higher resolution screen even with integer scale.
They could be using those pixels to add back the depth but it seems to be a pretty simple grid with single colours being filled in per pixel.
Seems like a waste when they have 100 times the resolution of the Game Boy at their disposal, but maybe the Pocket itself just doesn’t have the raw graphics power to render a more advanced filter like that?
Do you have an example of what you mean? It’s hard for me to imagine how they’d create an illusion of depth using a filter.
It’s mentioned earlier by somebody else, but it would be putting a drop shadow on each emulated pixel (like a slightly darker bottom and right edge). Or something along those lines.
@Peltz @matt Yup, something closer to this:
They already have a desaturation setting and a sharpness setting, they could add a setting that controls drop shadows. But not sure how GPU intensive it would be to render it given the 1660 x 1440 resolution screen it’s driving.
Edit: Surprised to see that the English version of Snow Bros Jr loses the smooth transitions between stages in favour of hard screen breaks (and music that resets itself)
Game Boy gem recommendations:
Lock ‘n’ Chase | Mr. Do! | Catrap | Jurassic Park Part 2: The Chaos Continues | Dexterity
Trax | Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Montana’s Movie Madness | Cosmo Tank | Adventure Island II: Aliens in Paradise | Amazing Penguin
Battle Bull | Word Zap | Bomberman GB | Pyramids of Ra | Solomon’s Club
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Nice picks! I still really want to play Trax but I’m struggling to track down a Japanese cart (Ponkotsu Tank) at a reasonable price. Looks really interesting though.
Bomberman GB 3 is probably my favourite single player Bomberman next to Custom Battler Bomberman, fantastic stuff.
Have you played the Solomon’s Club sequel? It’s just called Solomon in Japan, but in America it was renamed to Monster Rancher Explorer. Like Solomon’s Club it was developed by Graphic Research Inc!
I played through Cosmo Tank a couple of months ago and was blown away by how ambitious it was at blending both top down shooting/exploration stages with dungeon crawling and first person combat.
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