If a Weapons Dealer made a GameBoy - ModRetro Chromatic

Palmer Luckey is known for his work creating the VR Headset company Oculus, but since selling the company to Meta, he's been making... "different" products for very different buyers. That is, until today! The ModRetro Chromatic is a new FPGA handheld console that aims to bring you right back to the 90s with a faithful recreation of the GameBoy Colour with updated comforts we couldn't live without today. Will Linus be impressed, or should Luckey stick to making unmanned drones?

CHAPTERS
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0:00 What do we have here?
1:27 Design and ports/buttons
4:25 Sponsor - Hohem
5:57 Comparison devices, Linus plays Tetris
7:11 Playing Chromatic game cart on other consoles
11:19 Playing GB/GBC games
12:18 Overall thoughts
13:03 Outro

[ShortCircuit]

Correction: We've removed Linus accidentally calling the Analogue Pocket "emulation" instead of "recreation" since it's FPGA which isn't really emulating, but actually replicating the original hardware and removed Linus calling out the OG GameBoy's lack of a brightness wheel since it was causing confusion about the original's contrast wheel! Sorry for the mixups!- Bell

Thanks to Hohem for sponsoring this video!

[Krynis]

so I've learned that the Chromatic port of Tetris was actually done by Chromatic and was properly licensed and even runs on a proper GBC, neat.

[confuzionn]

To be fair to the Chromatic, when the original Gameboy was released it cost the same in 2024 dollars as the Chromatic.

[BollingHolt]

I'm glad to see that people are willing to spend the time and money to make high-quality devices like this, and I hope there's enough interest to inspire more.

[blabla-ru]

Chromatic was not made to run many systems good. It was made to run one system perfectly.

[Pkgeno]

The original gameboys were actually great outdoors because of the lack of backlight.

[brandon-butler]

Some of the comments are confusing/wrong.

The original GB/C were great outdoors, the brighter the sun the better.
The Analogue Pocket is using FPGA not software emulation.

[paisleyboxers]

So! The Analogue GBC feature - the analogue screen is 4k and the filter for GBC actually recreates the original gameboy color sub pixels. The complains you had about the filter setting is because someone who used it last set a smoothing filter on it. That's not the fault of the Analogue gameboy color! try the original GBC screen filter, it's absolutely incredibe!

[qbit]

"You can see it slow down a little like the original hardware would. Authentic lag."
At the time the Gameboy was released game consoles didn't have programmamable graphics hardware, and were so slow that they usually didn't even have an operating system on them. The games had to be in full control of the hardware that was present, which meant they had to be hardcoded to work with only that hardware and its limitations. This means that wherever an fpga or an emulator is used to play these games they have to behave exactly like the original hardware did. It also means that no matter what hardware you use to emulate these games they will never run any faster than they do on the original console. You will never see a Gameboy game run any faster than 59.73fps, because speeding up the picture processing unit means speeding up the cpu and everything it does including sound and game physics.
This can actually be seen on the Super Gameboy which runs approximately 2% faster, and that is enough to noticeably affect the pitch of the sound as well as make the games harder than intended.
A similar problem also occurres on some older pc games in which the game didn't use the system clock to limit the game speed. On modern hardware these games are unplayable without mods, sure to running too fast.

[inceptional]

To be fair, the Chromatic offers the best "battery" options possible on any of these handheld devices right now: You can choose to use three normal single use batteries or three rechargeable batteries or the upcoming rechargeable battery pack. Whatever works best for you personally. And, sure, some people might have expected the rechargeable battery to come bundled at the price, but I think I can forgive that given this thing really is premium.

[MaartenT]

The original GameBoy DID have a slider/wheel (I believe for contrast) because how dark the screen was depended on how much charge there was left in the batteries. Also, the Analogue Pocket uses fPGA, not emulation.

[watercannonscollaboration]

3:45 that’s a nice touch, instead of having to find some proprietary battery you can just add some rechargeable AAs and swap them out in the future once they start to wear out

[nunyabiness]

man clearly never played an original game boy outside. That’s was the only place you could see the screen really well

[adamyetsko]

Too expensive for the man selling a $70 screwdriver! Come on Linus! People pay more for a little better. Isn't your backpack $350?

[BloodyIron]

The OG Gameboy speaker in the video at 7:50 is for sure dead. It DID NOT sound that bad when new.

[FlfyCats]

WOW!! My nostalgia brain is FIZZING at how COLORFUL that thing is!! If it was a handheld system like the Steam Deck that could run more modern games on low settings, or install emulators, the price would be totally worth it! As much as it hurts to say I'm never in the mood to play my old GameBoy games anymore, the physical design of this device itself is SO CLOSE to selling me on it.

[JM-pmyb]

I love my analogue pocket, but I also ordered one of these.

[Roshan_]

9:35 wtf do you mean the original gameboy was designed to be played in bright light such as the sun it works much better outside than inside

[theseriousaccount]

The most half hearted video i have ever seen from LTT.

[johnp]

That GameBoy Pocket got me through NYC highschool travel in the subway.