Analogue 3D review – better late than never, this N64 redux is another best-in-class retro experience

For Analogue, the boutique gaming brand that made its business in mining the emotions of the cash- and nostalgia-rich grown-up hardcore, the game has surely changed. When the company burst onto the scene in 2015, the use of FPGA technology to run old games was relatively new. Now, everybody is at it – and so Analogue finds itself needing to more precisely carve out and defend its corner of the market.

It’s key to understand the nature of an FPGA, and the current state of retro gaming, to truly understand the much-delayed and now finally-available Analogue 3D, which is the brand’s first foray into full-3D gaming with a replica of the Nintendo 64. So let’s start there, shall we?

The term FPGA stands for Field-Programmable Gate Array. This sounds scarier and more complicated than it is. In short, while traditional emulation as we’d typically think of it runs games on a general-purpose CPU, FPGA actually replicates the original hardware – in this case the N64 – at a fundamental level, down to all the foibles and quirks of the chip. The aim is to produce what is functionally a one-to-one replica of the original hardware’s circuitry with modern technology, rather than just a computer program masquerading its best attempt at impersonating a piece of old hardware.

FPGA has taken the retro gaming scene by storm for obvious reasons. FPGA generally results in a more accurate representation of the original hardware – so you’re much less likely to ever run into weird things where emulation messes up a game’s presentation. It’s also very low latency. If you want the ‘closest thing’ to an original console and cart, arcade board, or what have you, FPGA is the way to go.

The Analogue 3D is an FPGA-powered recreation of a Nintendo 64. But where things are now different is that over the last several years FPGA tech has more widely proliferated. If you’re a tinkerer, you can build or buy something like a MiSTer machine, an open-source FPGA hardware platform built for retro gamers. A MiSTer device is going to be similarly priced or possibly even cheaper than Analogue’s effort – and it will be able to load multiple ‘cores’, allowing it to play games from multiple pieces of hardware.

Basically, you can do what this machine ‘does’, at a layman’s level, cheaper. But as with its previous products, the Analogue 3D has an ace up its sleeve: purity.

Alright, analogy time. Retro gaming now runs quite parallel, I think, to music on vinyl. If you want to get into playing vinyl, you have a few options. Pull up Amazon or Argos and you can pick up some cute-looking record player for about thirty quid that often has built-in speakers or even hooks up to Bluetooth speakers. In gaming terms, this is equivalent to things like the officially-branded SNES or Mega Drive Mini, or Blaze’s licensed Super Pocket.

You could also spend a hundred-plus, though, and buy something a little more specialist. A ‘proper’ record player. But this is where the market becomes a bit of a nightmare, right? You can spend 150 quid in Argos on something with bookshelf speakers included, or you could go to Richer Sounds and suddenly you’re in the hole for a grand with expensive all-singing and dancing audiophile speakers on top of a beautiful high-end turntable. This segment of the record player market is as narrow as a brook, but as deep as the ocean. It’s home to users who are full-blown audio nutters, and also folk who do think vinyl sounds better and have disposable income – but otherwise don’t really know much else about it.

Anyway, it’s the retro gaming category’s version of this same area where you get stuff like the AyaNeo handhelds or the Polymega, which are traditional emulation, plus FPGA devices like a MiSTer or the offerings from Analogue. While MiSTer is more of a DIY solution, Analogue offers boutique products. Plug-and-play, ready to roll, happy to accept your original carts. Generally speaking, you shouldn’t have to fiddle around with SD cards and USB devices with these guys. You buy it, you plug it in – and it functions and looks as you remember. It’ll even take your original controllers.

There’s gorgeous industrial design that goes a long way to selling this as a premium product and a high-end experience. The Analogue 3D looks like a mini-N64, and I presume is as evocative of the original machine as the company can be without invoking the fury of Nintendo’s lawyers (which, as it turns out, is very). When you pick up a device like this it’s common that they can feel floaty in the hands, like the innards of this shapely shell are largely empty. This feels firm and solid. It feels quality in the hands.

Or to put it another way, with another creaking analogy, a MiSTer is a kit car that users can put together and tweak to their heart’s desire. An Analogue 3D is a sports car fresh off the forecourt. Both have their place, clearly.

Based on these analogies, you probably already know precisely where you stand on the Analogue 3D. You are either going to be the sort of person who appreciates a product like this, or you’re not. If you’re not, you’re likely thinking a MiSTer is better value for money, or you’re thinking accuracy isn’t really worth all this fuss and you’re happy fiddling away on Nintendo Switch Online’s N64 emulator. And that’s fine. But if you’re picking up what Analogue is putting down in terms of vision – a vision that has been consistent across high-end versions of the NES, SNES, Mega Drive, Game Boy, and TurboGrafx-16 to date – you’re going to love what’s been accomplished here.

The big new shift this time is ‘3DOS’, which is an all-new operating system for the Analogue 3D. Previous Analogue devices used a more generic operating system when the machines got powered on – but the company is shifting to machine-specific operating systems, allowing for a more specific setup more specifically relevant to the hardware in question and its games. 3DOS has the downlow, Analogue says, on every Nintendo 64 game ever released. Accessories like the Memory Pak, Rumble Pak, Transfer Pak, and so on just work.

The real flex comes in display modes and how the games run, however. We’re all used to emulators with ugly filters, and Analogue has an approximation of that. But the company also pointedly says they are “not filters, not approximations”. Rather, these are carefully-engineered replications of how certain displays output the original N64. This is something that this company did with the Pocket, offering display styles that recreated the unique look of the screens of various models of Game Boy. This time, it’s been done with reference CRT and PVM displays, aiming to get a look that is painfully close to how an N64 would’ve looked in 1996 – not just slapping scanlines and fuzz across an emulated image.

There’ll be time, I’ve no doubt, for the hardcore experts to weigh in on this execution. Eurogamer’s friends and former colleagues at Digital Foundry are surely diving deep. What I’ll offer on my more limited testing is as follows: It looks bloody brilliant. In fact, it’s the best that I think a machine like this has presented out-of-the-box without doing deep tweaking and fiddling – the variety of presets available is I think sure to have something that’ll appeal to almost all players. Meanwhile, if you want to go true sicko mode, there’s a lot of latitude to adjust and tweak. I found the presets offered an easy way to make games ‘feel’ right, however – and if you do make tweaks, you can do so per-game, thereby being able to dial in the exact visual settings for each title.

This is a particularly crucial thing for Analogue to have got right, really – N64 games look more natural, and just overall better, when their image is softened by the TV hardware of the day. That early 3D doesn’t cope well in crisp modern direct feed, much as with the PS1. The Analogue 3D uses its native 4K output not to render the games at a higher resolution and thereby expose every flaw and rough modelling seam in Mario 64’s models. Instead, the games are rendered at their natural base resolution, but then the filtering after the fact is applied at 4K. It’s quite a pathway to get something close to the original look on those old, over-sized displays. You can, of course, turn all that off if you wish – but if you’re minded to do that, I’d suggest this product might be a waste of money to you.

While you can use any controller with an N64 connector from official pads to the crummy Mad Catz one guests would get at sleepovers, Analogue has again partnered with 8BitDo for an ‘official’ option. Their N64 controller is utterly lovely, and syncs to the Analogue 3D without a dongle in a similar way to how you’d sync a modern Xbox, PlayStation, or Switch controller.

While purity and accuracy is the name of the game, the Analogue 3D has a few tricks up its sleeve that stretch that – but in the best possible way. The N64 was home to a lot of games that were swimmy at best, putting it lightly – but you can pump up the performance just a tad with the Analogue 3D, taking the framey edginess off games.

GoldenEye has never been this smooth played off a cartridge. Seeing Conker’s Bad Fur Day breezing along at an actually relatively stable 30 frames per second in an otherwise 100 percent accurate environment feels… wrong. But here it is. This is 3DOS at play, where what’s actually happening is the console is recognizing the inserted cartridge, then applying overclocking settings tweaked by Analogue to that specific game. If you find the overclock distasteful, you can of course turn it off.

The machine swings for the fences on these technical elements. There’s HDR support, 32-bit colour, and everything I’m mentioning here can be toggled – so if you want all the filters off (disgusting), so be it. If you want to throttle the performance down to be 100% N64-accurate, go for it. You can even do things like turn off the Virtual Expansion Pak – the equivalent of pulling the Expansion Pak out of an N64 – to ensure non-expansion Pak games run the same as on an N64 without one. Yes, you can also access the weird multiplayer-only version of Perfect Dark this way.

I adore that little note. It’s small, but the fact this is a plug-and-play product that lets you do something like that with the original Perfect Dark speaks volumes to the attitude around this machine. It is first and foremost a modern N64. Analogue doesn’t generally support popping in an SD card full of ROMs, for instance – this is for original carts. And the one Flash Cart I have, an Everdrive 64 X5, doesn’t currently boot. Users will inevitably find a way around those things, as always – but it speaks to the sort of thing they’re making here. It’s an acquired taste for a very particular market of sickos. There is also the promise that this machine will be tweaked and improved over time.

I love it. But I probably should love it, at $250 for a machine that plays games from thirty years ago – plus the inevitable costs of carts and controllers. I expect the release of the 3D will quite literally drive up the already-spenny prices of N64 games on the second-hand market, too. But then again, the people that this is for will be happier to bear that cost – and people happy to deal with the inherent flaws that come with N64 games. This machine is about accuracy, and though it makes minor changes it doesn’t shave those built-in rough edges off entirely.

Analogue has had great success with this business model in the past. If you wanted a plug-and-play, minimal-fiddling, high-end way to play your NES, SNES, Mega Drive, Game Boy, Game Gear, Master System, and TurboGrafx-16 games on modern hardware at the highest level of accuracy, while cost isn’t really an object… Well, it was Analogue then. And with the release of the Analogue 3D, the same is now true for the N64.

You probably knew very early on in this write up – or before even reading – if you were in the potential market for this. If you are, consider this the confirmation that even after all the delays and pre-shipping woes, Analogue has still got it and their latest absolutely slaps. If what they offer doesn’t appeal, the good news now is that the retro market has more options than ever – it’s a great time to love old games.