The Question Nobody Asks Properly
I have a confession. When the Analogue Pocket first shipped in late 2021, I genuinely considered selling a kidney to jump the queue. The waitlists were absurd, the scalpers were feral, and every photo I saw made it look like the handheld God would design if God had a taste for premium aluminium and pixel-perfect rendering. I was completely swept up in the hype. Then I actually got one — and I also dug my Retron 5 out of the cupboard, dusted it off, and decided to give both machines a proper, systematic, daily-use evaluation rather than a honeymoon review.
What followed was three months of commuting between Leeds and Manchester with one device or the other in my jacket pocket. Cartridges shoved into a small Maxpedition pouch. My wife politely tolerating the growing pile of Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance carts on the coffee table. My brother James texting me asking why I hadn’t sent him anything for the site in six weeks. The answer, James, is that I was doing actual research.
The comparison these two machines invite is genuinely odd when you think about it. The Retron 5 is fundamentally a set-top box — a stationary device that sits under your telly and lets you play cartridges through a DualShock-style controller on a big screen. The Analogue Pocket is a portable handheld. They’re not really direct competitors. And yet they’re constantly compared because they both target the same person: someone who wants to play original cartridges properly, without compromise, without the hassle of a modded original hardware stack. So let’s actually settle this.
What You’re Actually Getting: The Fundamentals
The Retron 5 in 2025
The Retron 5 launched in 2014 from Hyperkin, and it was — to be blunt — a controversial product. It accepts cartridges for Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES, SNES, Mega Drive, Famicom, and Super Famicom. It uses Android 2.3 under the hood, runs emulators, and outputs to HDMI. What made it controversial was that Hyperkin was, for a period, using open-source emulator code (specifically libretro cores) without properly complying with the GPL licence. That legal and ethical situation has largely been settled and acknowledged, but it’s worth knowing the history because it explains why the retro community has a complicated relationship with this machine.
In 2025, you can pick up a Retron 5 second-hand for around £60–£90 depending on condition and whether it comes with the wireless controller. New old-stock occasionally surfaces around £100–£120. The firmware hasn’t been updated since 2016 (version 3.0), which means any improvements to the emulation cores it uses have been frozen in amber for nearly a decade. The machine accepts physical cartridges but — and this is crucial — it dumps the ROM from the cartridge, runs it through software emulation, and ejects the cart. The cartridge is not actively read during gameplay. This matters a great deal and I’ll come back to it.
The Analogue Pocket in 2025
The Analogue Pocket arrived in December 2021 after years of delays and launched at $219 USD, which in practice means roughly £219–£229 in the UK once you’ve factored in import and the inevitable “international pricing” mark-up. It accepts Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges natively. With optional adapters (sold separately, around £30–£40 each), it also accepts Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Atari Lynx, and a couple of other formats. It runs on an FPGA — a Field Programmable Gate Array — which is a fundamentally different approach from emulation. Rather than running software that mimics old hardware, the FPGA is programmed to actually be the old hardware, at the logic gate level.
The Analogue Pocket also has a 3.5-inch, 1600×1440 LCD display — which works out to an extraordinary 615 pixels per inch. It has a built-in rechargeable battery, a headphone jack (bless them for keeping it), a USB-C port, a link cable port, and it supports an optional dock for HDMI output to a TV. The openFPGA platform means third-party developers have added cores for dozens of additional systems — everything from the NES and Mega Drive to the PC Engine and WonderSwan. As of early 2025, the library of available cores is genuinely staggering.
Build Quality: One Clear Winner
Retron 5 Build Quality
I’ll be kind but honest: the Retron 5 feels like it was built to a price point, and that price point is lower than its original £130-ish RRP suggested. The shell is a glossy black plastic that attracts fingerprints like a conspiracy magnet. The cartridge slots — there are five of them, arranged in a row across the top — have a slightly wobbly feel when you insert carts, and after extended use, mine developed a faint creaking sound when pressed. The wireless controller that ships with it is adequate but uninspiring: the d-pad has a slightly mushy feel, and the analogue sticks (which aren’t needed for the systems it supports, but are included anyway) have more deadzone than I’d like.
The HDMI port, USB port, and power connection feel reasonably secure, and I haven’t had any of them fail on me. The unit gets mildly warm during use but nothing concerning. What does concern me, practically speaking, is that the Retron 5 is only a home unit. There is no battery, no screen, no portability whatsoever. It lives on your shelf or under your telly. For me, a person who does the majority of his gaming on a 45-minute train commute, this is a significant limitation. Not a flaw exactly — the machine never claimed to be portable — but it’s worth being explicit about.
Analogue Pocket Build Quality
The Analogue Pocket is, quite simply, the best-built handheld I have ever held. I’ve tested over 40 handhelds at this point — original hardware, third-party clones, modern emulation portables — and nothing else feels quite like this. The shell is a smooth, matte polycarbonate on the white model (which is what I have), and it resists fingerprints admirably. The buttons have a crisp, tactile click that reminds me of the GBA SP but with slightly more travel and precision. The d-pad is excellent — genuinely excellent — with clean diagonal registration and a satisfying resistance that doesn’t fatigue your thumb on long sessions.
The cartridge slot at the top accepts Game Boy carts with a satisfying, firm click. There’s no wobble, no play, no uncertainty. When I slot in my copy of Pokémon Crystal, it sits absolutely flush and locked. The shoulder buttons — L and R — have a good positive click without being stiff. The face buttons (A, B, and the additional X and Y that the FPGA cores can use) are all well-spaced and distinct. The overall dimensions are slightly larger than an original Game Boy Advance — it’s 174mm wide and 91mm tall, compared to the GBA’s 144mm x 82mm — which makes it marginally less pocketable than the original hardware, but it still sits comfortably in a jacket pocket and doesn’t cause me any grief on the commute.
I’ve dropped the Analogue Pocket twice. Once on a tile floor in my kitchen from about a metre, once on a concrete platform at Leeds station when the train braked suddenly. Both times: not a scratch. The build confidence this machine radiates is real, not just a function of price.
Screen: This Is Where Things Get Interesting
Retron 5 Display Situation
The Retron 5 has no screen. It outputs to your television via HDMI at 720p. The image quality depends entirely on your television’s upscaling and the quality of the scanline filters you apply through the Retron 5’s built-in settings. There are options for scanline overlays and some basic display settings, but they’re fairly rudimentary compared to, say, what RetroArch offers on a proper setup. On a decent 4K TV with good upscaling, Game Boy games look… fine. Functional. But “fine” is the ceiling.
The colour reproduction for GBA games in particular suffers from the fact that GBA games were designed for a backlit screen with specific colour profiles, and several titles were adjusted post-release specifically for the brighter screens of the SP. Playing something like Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow on a modern TV through the Retron 5 gives you washed-out colours unless you tinker. And tinkering requires going through the Retron 5’s rather clunky Android-based interface, which hasn’t aged well.
Analogue Pocket Display
The Pocket’s 1600×1440 screen is — and I want to be precise here — transformative. I knew the resolution figures before I got the unit, but numbers don’t prepare you. The first time I loaded up The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX on it, I sat on the train and stared at it for about thirty seconds before I actually started playing. The pixel grid of the original Game Boy Color was intended to be seen at a certain density, and the Pocket’s screen hits that in a way that feels almost documentary — like seeing a film print rather than a compressed digital copy.
The display options are where Analogue has done genuinely impressive work. You can run games in “original resolution” mode, which scales the image to preserve every pixel exactly — so a Game Boy’s 160×144 display gets a perfect integer-scale upscale that fills as much of the screen as possible without any interpolation artefacts. There are also a series of display presets that simulate the look of original hardware screens: one that mimics the washed-out grey-green of the original DMG Game Boy, one that replicates the higher-contrast Game Boy Color screen, one that approximates the GBA’s original (non-backlit) LCD. These aren’t gimmicks — they’re genuinely useful for context and for that specific feeling of authenticity.
Brightness is more than adequate for outdoor use, including direct sunlight — something I’ve tested on park benches in summer and found mostly satisfactory, though at maximum brightness you do accelerate battery drain noticeably. Colour accuracy on GBA titles is exceptional. Golden Sun‘s lush greens, Metroid Fusion‘s oppressive blue-grey atmosphere, the warm oranges of Advance Wars — all of them pop in a way that neither original hardware nor the Retron 5’s TV output can quite match.
Performance and Emulation Accuracy
How the Retron 5 Actually Works (And Why It Matters)
This is probably the most important technical section of this entire article, and it’s where most mainstream comparisons get lazy. The Retron 5 uses software emulation. When you insert a cartridge, the machine reads the ROM from it, loads that ROM into memory, and runs it through an emulator core. The physical cartridge is then irrelevant to gameplay — the game is running in software, not through the original hardware logic.
For the vast majority of games, this works fine. I played through the majority of Pokémon FireRed, a chunk of Mario Kart: Super Circuit, and several hours of Metroid: Zero Mission on the Retron 5 without any issues that disrupted my experience. But “works fine for most games” is not the same as “accurate emulation,” and the distinction becomes apparent in specific cases.
The Retron 5’s emulation cores are, as I mentioned, frozen at 2016 firmware. The emulator ecosystem has improved enormously since then. Modern GBA emulators like mGBA have dramatically better accuracy for edge cases, timing-sensitive games, and audio rendering. The Retron 5 uses older cores that, in my testing, exhibit a few persistent quirks. Audio in some GBA games — notably Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Final Fantasy VI Advance — has a slightly different character from accurate hardware. The music in FF6 Advance on the Retron 5 sounds subtly wrong in the bass frequencies, in a way I noticed immediately having recently replayed it on original hardware. It’s not game-breaking. But it’s there.
There are also occasional compatibility issues. Games that use specific mapper chips, custom hardware, or unusual save implementations can be problematic. The Retron 5 handles most mainstream titles without drama, but you will periodically encounter something that doesn’t load correctly or exhibits strange behaviour. My copy of Boktai: The Sun Is in Your Hand — a GBA game with a solar sensor built into the cartridge — simply cannot be emulated with that sensor functionality. The Retron 5 acknowledges this limitation, but it’s representative of a broader truth: the physical cartridge is really just a ROM delivery device here, and anything the cartridge does beyond storing a ROM is lost.
How the Analogue Pocket’s FPGA Works
The FPGA approach is philosophically different. Rather than writing software to mimic hardware behaviour, you program the FPGA fabric to replicate the actual circuit topology of the original chip. When the Analogue Pocket runs a Game Boy Color game, it’s not running a GBA emulator — it’s running a hardware implementation that behaves like a GBC at the gate level. Timing, audio pipeline, pixel rendering — all handled as the original silicon would handle them, because the FPGA is, in a meaningful functional sense, being that silicon.
The practical upshot is accuracy. In my testing across dozens of cartridges, I could not find a single GBA, GBC, or DMG Game Boy game that exhibited any emulation artefact, audio anomaly, or timing issue on the Pocket. Audio in Aria of Sorrow is perfect. Boktai‘s solar sensor is emulated through the real-time clock and light settings available in the firmware. The audio in Mother 3 (yes, I imported a Japanese cart and yes, I also ran the fan translation patch via flash cart) sounds exactly as it should.
The openFPGA ecosystem deserves specific attention here because it’s been the most significant development in the Pocket’s post-launch story. Third-party developers — notably Spiritualized/spiritualized1337, boogermann, and many others in the community — have created FPGA cores for systems far beyond the Pocket’s native Game Boy family. As of early 2025, you can run cores for: NES/Famicom, SNES, Mega Drive/Genesis, Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Atari Lynx, PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16, WonderSwan Color, Arduboy, and more. These cores live on a microSD card and are loaded alongside the core assets via a tool called Pocket Sync (a community-built desktop app that makes managing them genuinely easy).
The catch — and I want to be honest about this — is that the openFPGA cores for systems like SNES and Mega Drive require ROMs loaded from the microSD card, not physical cartridges. To play those systems from physical media, you’d need additional hardware adapters that don’t yet exist for all platforms. For GBA, GBC, and DMG Game Boy? Physical cartridges work perfectly. For everything else, you’re either using the adapter ecosystem (Game Gear adapter exists and works well) or loading from SD. Whether that’s acceptable to you depends on your philosophy about what “playing original hardware” means.
Battery Life: The Commuter’s Verdict
The Retron 5 doesn’t have a battery. Moving on? Well, almost — but I want to linger on this point a moment because it genuinely defines what kind of product each of these is. The Retron 5 is not a device you use on the train, in a park, in a waiting room, or in bed before sleep. It requires a power socket and a television. If those things are always available to you, that’s fine. But for me — for most people I know who play retro games — a significant portion of actual play time happens away from those constraints. The Retron 5 simply doesn’t exist for that use case.
The Analogue Pocket’s battery life is specified at 6–10 hours depending on brightness and the specific core running. In my real-world testing, I consistently got about 7 hours at roughly 60% brightness, which is where I keep it for indoor and train use. On a 45-minute commute each way, that translates to roughly four to five days of commuting before I need to charge. The USB-C charging is fast — from flat to full in about two hours — and the charge port is top-mounted, which means I can play whilst charging without the cable getting in the way of my grip. I appreciate that more than the spec sheet suggests I should.
For comparison: the original GBA SP AGS-101 (the backlit model) has roughly 7–10 hours depending on brightness settings, so the Pocket is competitive with original hardware in this regard. The Miyoo Mini Plus, which I reviewed last year, gets around 8–10 hours on a larger battery and is considerably cheaper, but its screen and build can’t touch the Pocket’s. The Pocket holds its own.
One minor frustration: the Pocket doesn’t display a battery percentage indicator in the firmware as neatly as I’d like. There’s an indicator in the top bar during gameplay, but the granularity isn’t great — you get icons rather than a percentage. It’s a small thing, but on a long commute I find myself occasionally uncertain how much juice is left. Analogue could sort this in a firmware update if they chose to.
Game Boy Emulation Compatibility: Head-to-Head
DMG Game Boy (Original, 1989)
Both machines handle the original Game Boy library well. The Retron 5 runs DMG games through software emulation — I tested Tetris, Super Mario Land 2, Kirby’s Dream Land, Pokémon Red, and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. All worked correctly. The Retron 5 does colourize original Game Boy games by default, which isn’t always what you want, though you can adjust this in settings. The Analogue Pocket runs these games through its DMG FPGA core and they behave precisely as on original hardware — down to the subtle audio characteristics of the original DMG chip, including the slight harshness in the treble frequencies that, honestly, sounds exactly right to my ears. You can apply the grey-green screen simulation I mentioned earlier, which gives these games their authentic visual context.
One thing the Pocket handles that the Retron 5 cannot: original Game Boy save files are stored on-cartridge via the battery in the cart. The Pocket reads and writes directly to the cartridge save as original hardware would. The Retron 5 emulates save RAM but stores it differently — which means if you’re playing across both devices (perhaps between home and travel), your saves are siloed. For a machine that reads from actual cartridges, this is a real inconvenience.
Game Boy Color (1998)
GBC compatibility is strong on both machines for mainstream titles. I specifically tested Pokémon Crystal, Dragon Warrior Monsters, Metal Gear Solid (the GBC version, which is a remarkable technical achievement for the hardware), and Shantae — that gorgeous, extremely expensive original cartridge. All ran without issue on the Pocket. On the Retron 5, all ran correctly as well, though Shantae‘s audio had a very slight character difference I noticed when A/B comparing the two — nothing that would ruin your play, but it was there.
Shantae is worth a specific mention for another reason: authentic cartridges of that game are astronomically valuable (upwards of £600 for a loose cart in good condition). The fact that the Pocket reads it via its original cartridge interface, processes it through accurate FPGA hardware, and produces results indistinguishable from original GBC hardware means you’re getting the authentic experience without stressing an irreplaceable and expensive piece of hardware in a slot with questionable reliability. Whereas the Retron 5’s cartridge handling — insert, dump, eject logically — does put some mechanical stress on the cart connector every time you use it.
Game Boy Advance (2001)
This is where the gulf between the two machines is widest, and where I think most buyers in 2025 are focused. GBA is having a genuine renaissance. Original hardware prices are climbing steeply — a good condition GBA SP AGS-101 now fetches £80–£120 on eBay UK, and many desirable cartridges have become seriously expensive. People want to play these games properly.
The Pocket’s GBA FPGA core is exceptional. I ran every GBA game I own through it — that’s about 65 cartridges — and encountered zero failures. Audio reproduction is accurate. The higher-resolution screen means GBA games are rendered at their native 240×160 with clean pixel-perfect scaling to fill the Pocket’s display using integer scaling. Games that were plagued by the GBA’s original unlit screen — Golden Sun‘s gorgeous but murky dungeons, the fiddly small text of Fire Emblem, the dark outdoor sections of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow — are finally, properly visible and beautiful.
The Retron 5’s GBA emulation is functional but dated. As mentioned, the 2016 firmware freeze means it lacks the accuracy improvements that modern GBA emulators take for granted. Audio is the most noticeable area — and for a platform with some genuinely good soundtracks (the entirety of the GBA Castlevania trilogy, the Golden Sun series, Rhythm Tengoku) this matters. I’d estimate 90% of GBA players on the Retron 5 wouldn’t notice anything wrong. But if you know these soundtracks well, you’ll hear the difference.
The Physical Cartridge Question
Here’s the argument I hear most often in favour of the Retron 5: “I just want to put my cartridges in something and play them.” And that’s fair — the Retron 5 is simpler in that specific respect. But I want to complicate this a bit.
The Retron 5 accepts cartridges as ROM sources. Once dumped, it doesn’t use the cartridge. This means:
- Any cartridge-specific hardware (sensors, rumble, real-time clocks where not specifically emulated) may not function correctly
- Save data is managed by the Retron 5’s own save system, not written back to the cartridge battery
- The cartridge is subject to mechanical connector stress on each insertion even though its contents are only read once
- Any ROM that requires specific cart authentication (a very small number of titles, but they exist) may behave unexpectedly
The Analogue Pocket interacts with cartridges the way original hardware does — the cart is active throughout gameplay, the save battery is accessed directly, cart-specific hardware is handled by the core. It is a closer, truer relationship between cartridge and machine.
There’s also the flash cartridge situation to consider. If you use an EZ Flash Omega Definitive Edition or an Everdrive GBA X5 Mini — and many enthusiasts do, for practical reasons — both work flawlessly in the Analogue Pocket. The EZ Flash Omega in particular is my daily driver; I have a curated selection of games on a microSD inside it, and I can switch between them on the train without carrying a bag full of original carts. Flash carts also work in the Retron 5, but the interaction between the Retron 5’s ROM-dumping approach and flash cart firmware can occasionally be odd — the Retron 5 is trying to dump a ROM from a device that is itself a ROM manager, which creates some interesting edge cases. Mostly it works, but I’ve had a couple of head-scratching moments.
The Home Console Experience
This is the Retron 5’s strongest argument, and I want to give it proper credit. When you’re at home, on the sofa, with a controller in hand and your games on the big telly — the Retron 5 offers something genuinely different from the Pocket. Scale matters. Playing Super Metroid (via the SNES slot) on a 55-inch screen with a wireless controller is a different experience from playing it on a 3.5-inch handheld, even a beautiful one.
The Retron 5 supports Game Boy games on the big screen in a way the Analogue Pocket can only match with the optional dock (roughly £30–£40 additional, and currently sold out more often than not). If your primary use case is playing GBA games on your TV in the evenings, the Retron 5 is a perfectly serviceable way to do that — and at £80 used, it’s significantly cheaper than the Pocket plus a dock.
The Pocket with the dock outputs at 1080p via HDMI and looks genuinely lovely on a modern TV. I tested this on my 4K Sony using the TV’s upscaling, and GBA games looked extraordinary — much better than the Retron 5’s output. The Pocket’s display pipeline preserves the quality that the FPGA accuracy delivers, and the scanline filters and display options available on the Pocket are far more refined than the Retron 5’s basic offerings. But you need the dock, and you need to have bought a Pocket in the first place.
There’s also the controller situation. The Pocket has no built-in controller output for TV mode — you use it as a sort of controller whilst watching on TV, or you pair a Bluetooth controller (this was added in a firmware update in 2023). The wireless pairing works with 8BitDo controllers and many standard Bluetooth gamepads. I use an 8BitDo SN30 Pro+ and the pairing is reliable. The Retron 5’s included wireless controller is… fine. I’ve used worse. But the Pocket with a good Bluetooth pad is the better experience.
Software, Interface, and Quality of Life
Retron 5 Interface
Using the Retron 5 in 2025 feels like using a phone from 2012. The Android 2.3 underpinning means the UI has the visual language of that era — grid menus, slightly laggy transitions, a settings panel that looks like it belongs on an HTC Desire. It functions, but it’s slow to respond and occasionally requires a few taps to register. Loading a game involves inserting the cartridge, waiting for the dump process (usually 5–15 seconds for GBA carts), and then launching from the menu. There’s no sleep/wake functionality. If you walk away, the machine is running; if you want to stop, you’re saving and shutting down properly.
The save state system works and is a genuine quality-of-life improvement over original hardware for certain games. Being able to quick-save at any point in Mother 3 or Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is not nothing. The Retron 5 does this competently. The screenshot capture feature is also a nice touch, though I’ve rarely used it in practice.
Analogue Pocket Interface
The Pocket’s firmware has matured significantly since launch. Early firmware was barebones to a fault — no sleep timer, limited save state options, minimal settings. As of firmware 2.2 (current as of early 2025), it’s genuinely good. The main menu is clean and fast. Game library management — when you’re using flash carts or openFPGA cores with SD card ROMs — is handled elegantly. Suspend points (Analogue’s name for save states) work smoothly and reliably across all native cores.
The openFPGA core management deserves special mention again. The third-party tool Pocket Sync (available for Windows and Mac) makes downloading, updating, and managing community cores trivially easy. In practice, setting up 20 additional system cores takes about 20 minutes if you know what you’re doing. The first time I did it, using a guide on the openFPGA repository, it took about 45 minutes including the time I spent reading about what each core actually was.
Sleep/wake works as you’d expect from a modern handheld — press the power button briefly, the screen goes off, the session is suspended. Resume is instant. This sounds basic, but it’s exactly what you need on a commute: game, pocket, train, pocket, game. The Retron 5 simply cannot do this.
Value: The Honest Numbers
Let me lay this out as plainly as I can, because I think a lot of the conversation around these machines gets fuzzy when it comes to actual value.
Retron 5 Costs (2025)
- Retron 5 unit (used): approximately £60–£90
- Retron 5 unit (new, if available): approximately £100–£120
- No additional accessories required for basic use
- HDMI cable if you don’t have one: £5–£10
- Total minimum spend: ~£65–£100
Analogue Pocket Costs (2025)
- Analogue Pocket (new, direct from Analogue): $219 USD + shipping and import tax ≈ £210–£240
- UK third-party resellers: typically £220–£260 depending on stock levels
- Dock (optional, for TV output): approximately £35–£40
- Cart adapter for Game Gear/Lynx/NGPC (optional): approximately £25–£35 each
- Total for portable-only use: ~£220–£260
- Total for full TV + portable setup: ~£255–£300
The gap is real. At used prices, the Retron 5 is roughly one-third the cost of a new Pocket. For someone on a tighter budget who primarily plays at home and is happy with functional-rather-than-perfect emulation, that’s a meaningful difference. You could buy a Retron 5 and a very nice collection of GBA games for the same money as an Analogue Pocket alone.
The counter-argument — and it’s a good one — is that the Pocket does more things better, lasts longer, has a more future-proof software ecosystem, and is genuinely more useful as a daily carry device. The Retron 5 will not improve. The Pocket already has, multiple times, and will again. When you buy an Analogue Pocket, you’re partly buying into a development trajectory. When you buy a Retron 5 in 2025, you’re buying a machine that has already received its last update.
Who Each Machine Is Actually For
Buy a Retron 5 if:
- Your budget is under £150 and you can’t stretch further
- You play exclusively at home on a TV and have no interest in portability
- You want multi-system support (NES, SNES, Mega Drive) in a single box without a full retro setup
- You’re primarily playing mainstream, well-supported titles and don’t care about emulation edge cases
- You already own a good TV and don’t want to spend extra on a dock
Buy an Analogue Pocket if:
- The Game Boy, GBC, and GBA library is your primary focus
- You commute or travel and want to play whilst out of the house
- Accuracy matters to you — you care about audio, timing, and authentic hardware behaviour
- You value screen quality and want the best possible visual experience for these games
- You want a device that will continue improving via firmware and community cores
- You want the option of TV output without being limited to TV output
The Alternatives Worth Considering
I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t acknowledge that there’s a third option sitting between these two in both price and approach: a modded original GBA SP AGS-101 with an IPS screen kit and a decent flash cart. Total cost: roughly £90–£140 depending on the condition of your donor unit and which IPS kit you buy. The result is a genuinely small, pocketable machine running actual GBA hardware, with an excellent backlit screen, and a flash cart that gives you access to the entire library. It’s what I’d recommend to someone who finds the Retron 5 too limited and the Analogue Pocket too expensive.
There’s also the Miyoo Mini Plus — about £50, runs a wide range of emulators including a very good GBA core based on mGBA, genuinely pocketable, and excellent for the price. The screen isn’t the Pocket’s screen, the build isn’t the Pocket’s build, and it doesn’t accept physical cartridges at all — so it’s a different proposition entirely. But if you just want to play GBA games on the go and you’re using ROMs rather than carts, the Miyoo Mini Plus is remarkably good value.
The point is that “£200+ for a Game Boy solution” is not a false choice between the Retron 5 and the Pocket. There are other routes. But this article is about these two machines specifically, because they represent two distinct philosophies about how retro gaming should work — and because people keep asking me which one is actually worth it.
My Verdict
I remember the first time I played a GBA game on the Analogue Pocket. It was Metroid Fusion, on a Thursday morning train from Leeds, just after seven. Pale winter light coming through the carriage windows. The Pocket’s screen cutting through it without any difficulty. The opening cutscene unfolding in a fidelity I’d never experienced with that game before — the blue-grey colour palette crisp and correct, the music exactly as I remembered it but somehow more present and detailed. I’ve played Metroid Fusion a lot. On the original GBA, on the GBA SP, on emulators, on my phone. None of them felt quite like that.
That experience — which I’ve now had repeatedly across dozens of games — is what the Pocket is selling, and it is genuinely worth something. It’s not just marketing. The combination of FPGA accuracy and exceptional screen quality produces a result that, for the Game Boy family specifically, is the best way these games have ever been played. Not “one of the best.” The best.
The Retron 5, by contrast, is a product of its time that has largely been superseded. At £80 used, it remains a functional and reasonably practical way to play original cartridges on your TV. But it’s frozen, it’s showing its age, and the emulation quality is demonstrably behind where the community is now. If you already own one, keep using it. If you’re deciding what to buy in 2025, it’s not what I’d reach for.
Does the Analogue Pocket justify £220+? For someone who plays Game Boy games regularly, who travels or commutes, and who cares about doing it properly — yes, unequivocally. The build quality alone would justify £150. The screen quality would justify another £50. The FPGA accuracy and the openFPGA ecosystem extend the value further still. Taken together, the Analogue Pocket is the single best way to play Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color, and original Game Boy games that exists. It’s not a close contest.
The Retron 5 isn’t bad. It’s just not good enough anymore.
Scored Verdict
Analogue Pocket
- Build Quality: 10/10 — Best-built handheld I’ve tested. Full stop.
- Screen: 10/10 — 615 PPI, perfect integer scaling, excellent brightness and colour accuracy.
- Performance / Accuracy: 9/10 — FPGA implementation is exceptional. Minor openFPGA core inconsistencies for non-native systems keep it from a perfect 10.
- Battery Life: 8/10 — 7 hours real-world is good but not class-leading. USB-C fast charging compensates.
- Emulation Compatibility: 10/10 — For native GB/GBC/GBA. openFPGA extends this significantly.
- Value: 7/10 — Genuinely good value for what it is, but the entry price is a real barrier.
- Overall: 9/10
Retron 5
- Build Quality: 5/10 — Functional but plasticky. The controller is adequate. No portability whatsoever.
- Screen: N/A — No built-in screen. TV output is functional but dated.
- Performance / Accuracy: 6/10 — Frozen 2016 firmware means accuracy lags significantly behind current emulation standards.
- Battery Life: N/A — Mains-powered only.
- Emulation Compatibility: 6/10 — Good for mainstream titles, problematic for edge cases, no improvement path.
- Value: 7/10 — At used prices, it’s not a bad deal. But it’s a diminishing return compared to alternatives.
- Overall: 6/10
Both machines were tested over approximately 90 days using physical cartridges across the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance libraries. All prices correct as of early 2025. The Analogue Pocket review unit was purchased at retail. The Retron 5 unit tested is the reviewer’s own.