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Aluminum NES Maker Announces Smaller, Cheaper Analogue Nt Mini (polygon.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: Analogue, the company behind the aluminum NES known as the Analogue Nt, is releasing a smaller, less expensive version of its console this January. Known as the Analogue Nt mini, the new version of the long-sold out hardware will be 20 percent smaller and carry a lower price: $449. The original Analogue Nt was priced at $499, but its tinier successor will outclass the original model with a better offering, the company says. The mini will comes with RGB and HDMI output (1080p/720p/480p) built in. The console will include a wireless 8Bitdo NES30 controller and Retro Receiver -- compatible with PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Wii and Wii U Pro Controllers -- as part of the package. In addition, the Nt mini will support over 2,000 NES, Famicom and Famicom Disk System games.

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  1. Re:Price Point by Michalson · · Score: 4, Informative

    You're wrong, but it's not your fault since the article Slashdot used is extremely short on information so you simply made an assumption based on existing information.

    The original $500 Analogue Nt is indeed based on NES chips recovered from used Famicom (Japanese NES) consoles. However the $450 "mini" version announced does not include any NES components and is instead based around the Altera Cyclone V, a FPGA (field-programmable gate array) chip. This is essentially emulation in hardware. But a FPGA can't perfectly replicate the timings and quirks of the original Ricoh 2A03 that powered the NES and the maker seems to acknowledge this in the fact that the mini version adds user deployed firmware (revised FPGA code) updates.

    This makes their approach not much different from software emulators, patching away emulation inconsistencies as they are found by end users. The only difference is the software emulators have had a mostly open source approach and 20 years of incremental improvements to get the NES library right, while this will be a closed source effort by a small company with an entirely different approach to emulating the NES, requiring that they basically start from scratch. And at $450 per unit they may have a limited number of testers.