Why Does My Analogue Pocket Look Washed Out on a TV? (Fixed)

Sarah Hargreaves — Culture & Features Editor, RetroInHand

Last updated: May 2026

The Problem That Makes You Question Your Expensive Purchase

You’ve spent the best part of £220 on an Analogue Pocket — possibly more if you factored in the Analogue Dock at around £70, import costs, or the minor trauma of surviving one of Analogue’s notoriously stressful limited stock drops. You’ve got it set up on your TV. You load up a Game Boy cartridge, or maybe a gorgeous FPGA core, and something is immediately, obviously wrong. The image looks flat. Washed out. Like someone turned the contrast down on everything. Whites look grey. Blacks look like a slightly darker grey. The whole picture has a milky, low-rent quality that makes your telly look broken rather than your shiny new hardware.

This is one of the most common complaints from Analogue Pocket owners in the UK, and the good news is it has a straightforward fix. The short answer: your TV is probably receiving a Limited colour range signal and displaying it as if it were a Full range signal, or vice versa — and a single setting in either your Pocket’s output options or your TV’s HDMI input settings will sort it. I’ll walk you through exactly what to change and where to find it. But I also want to explain why this happens, because once you understand it, you’ll never be confused by it again — and you’ll start noticing the same issue cropping up all over retro gaming history in ways you probably never connected before.

This is one of those technical gremlins that sounds deeply boring until you realise it’s actually a window into decades of decisions about how video signals travel from a source to a screen — decisions that have been quietly affecting the way you’ve seen games your entire life. So bear with me. The fix takes two minutes. The context is worth knowing.

The Quick Fix: How to Stop Your Analogue Pocket Looking Washed Out on a TV

Before we get into the history and the why, here’s the direct answer for anyone who just wants to solve the problem and get back to playing Link’s Awakening DX.

Fix Option 1: Change the Colour Range Setting on Your Analogue Pocket

This is the most common solution and the one you should try first.

1. On your Analogue Pocket, go to Settings from the main menu.
2. Select Display.
3. Look for HDMI Colour Range (this option only appears when the Pocket is docked and outputting via HDMI).
4. You’ll see two options: Limited and Full. Switch between them.
5. If your picture currently looks washed out, it’s almost certainly set to Full when your TV expects Limited — switch it to Limited.
6. Alternatively, if your picture looks too dark and crushed, with no detail in shadows, the opposite is true — switch to Full.

Most modern televisions, particularly anything connected via HDMI in a home cinema context, default to expecting a Limited range signal. So in the majority of cases, switching the Pocket’s output to Limited will immediately fix the washed-out appearance. The difference when you toggle this is genuinely dramatic — you’ll see the image snap into proper contrast almost immediately.

Fix Option 2: Change the HDMI Colour Range Setting on Your TV

If you’d rather keep the Pocket set to Full range (some people prefer this for certain setups, and it can be technically more accurate depending on your display), you can instead tell your TV to interpret the incoming signal as Full range.

• Samsung TVs: Settings → Picture → Expert Settings → HDMI Colour Range → set to Full
• LG TVs (OLED/NanoCell): Settings → Picture → Additional Settings → HDMI Ultra Deep Colour → enable for the relevant HDMI port, then look for PC or Full range options
• Sony TVs: Settings → Display & Sound → Picture → Advanced Settings → Video → HDMI Signal Format → set to Enhanced Format
• Panasonic TVs: Menu → Picture → Advanced Settings → HDMI Range → set to Full

The exact menu path varies by manufacturer and firmware version, so if yours doesn’t match exactly, search your TV model number alongside “HDMI colour range full” and you’ll find it. The principle is the same on every set.

Which Option Should You Choose?

For most people, in most living rooms, on most televisions: set the Analogue Pocket to Limited range. That’s the industry standard for HDMI output to a television, it’s what your TV is almost certainly expecting, and it will give you the most accurate picture with the least fiddling. If you’re connecting to a PC monitor rather than a television, the answer might flip — monitors often default to Full range — but we’ll cover that later on.

Done? Good. Now let me tell you why any of this exists in the first place, because it’s genuinely fascinating and it connects directly to the PAL vs NTSC arguments many of us grew up arguing about in school.

What “Colour Range” Actually Means — And Why It Matters

Colour range — sometimes called black level, luminance range, or HDMI range depending on who’s writing the manual — describes how the brightness values in a digital video signal are mapped to actual light output on a screen.

Digital video uses numerical values to represent how bright each pixel should be. In an 8-bit signal, you have 256 possible values per channel, from 0 to 255. But here’s the thing: not all video standards use all 256 of those values. Some reserve the extreme ends of the scale for technical signalling purposes and only use the middle chunk for actual picture data.

Limited Range (Also Called “TV Range” or “Studio Swing”)

In the Limited range standard — which is what broadcast television, DVD, Blu-ray, and the vast majority of HDMI-connected home video devices use — black is represented by the value 16, not 0, and peak white is represented by 235, not 255. Values below 16 and above 235 exist but are reserved for what engineers call “super-black” and “super-white” — technical headroom used in broadcast production that you’re not meant to see on your television.

This standard came out of analogue television broadcasting. When video was transmitted over the airwaves or down composite cables, the signal needed some overhead at both ends to carry sync pulses and other technical information. The picture data sat in the middle. When the world moved to digital, this convention was carried forward — partly for backwards compatibility, partly because broadcast engineers were used to it, and partly because the headroom genuinely does have uses in post-production.

Full Range (Also Called “PC Range” or “Full Swing”)

Full range uses all 256 values: true black is 0, peak white is 255. This is what computers use, what PC graphics cards output by default, and what a lot of game developers work with when they’re creating assets on a monitor. There’s no reserved headroom; every value maps directly to a brightness level.

The problem arises at the boundary between these two worlds — specifically, when a device outputs one range and the display interprets it as the other. If your Pocket outputs Full range (0–255) but your TV interprets it as Limited range (treating 16 as black), it maps value 0 to something darker than black, which it can’t display, and value 255 to something brighter than white, which it also can’t display. The result is that it clamps or compresses the signal, and your blacks look dark grey and your whites look light grey. The whole image looks like it’s been overlaid with a thin film of milk. Which is exactly what “washed out” means.

Conversely, if your device outputs Limited range but your TV treats it as Full range, it takes value 16 (which is meant to be black) and displays it as a dark grey, because it knows that true black should be 0. Again: washed out, flat, low contrast.

Why Does the Analogue Pocket Default to the “Wrong” Setting?

This is a reasonable question and the answer requires a bit of nuance. The Pocket doesn’t necessarily default to the wrong setting — it depends on your setup. The Pocket’s HDMI colour range option exists precisely because different users have different displays, and Analogue wanted to give you the control to match your specific setup.

However, there are a few reasons why users frequently find themselves in the wrong configuration out of the box. First, Analogue’s primary audience includes a lot of enthusiasts who also use PC monitors, capture cards, and non-standard display setups — Full range territory. Second, some firmware versions have changed the default over time, which means if you updated your firmware without resetting to defaults, you might be running a legacy setting. Third, and most practically: people don’t always read the manual. (I include myself in this. The first time I set up my Pocket on the dock, I spent twenty minutes adjusting settings on my television before I thought to check the Pocket’s own display settings. Twenty minutes I could have spent playing Metroid II.)

The Historical Context: Britain Has Been Here Before

If you grew up playing games in the UK, you have already lived through multiple versions of this exact problem — situations where the signal coming out of a games console didn’t quite match what the television expected, and the result was an image that looked worse than it should have. The colour range issue on the Analogue Pocket is, in a very real sense, the 2020s version of arguments we were already having in the 1990s.

The most obvious parallel is the PAL vs NTSC divide. British televisions ran at 50Hz; American and Japanese televisions ran at 60Hz. Games were designed at 60Hz. When publishers brought those games to PAL territories, they often — not always, but often — simply ran the game at 50Hz without adjusting the internal game speed, which meant everything ran slower. Not by a tiny amount. By 17%. Sonic the Hedgehog was noticeably more sluggish. The music played flat. The whole thing had a slightly deflated quality that British players just accepted as normal, because we’d never seen the alternative. We thought that’s just what the games were like.

As we explored in our piece on the PS1’s dirty 50Hz secret and how to fix it today, this wasn’t just an aesthetic issue — it fundamentally changed how games felt to play, and in some cases altered difficulty because timing windows that worked at 60Hz became meaningfully different at 50Hz. British players were, without knowing it, playing a subtly worse version of games for years. The colour range mismatch on a docked Analogue Pocket is a different technical problem, but the experience of it is uncannily similar: something looks subtly off, the image doesn’t quite have the punch it should, and the cause is a mismatch between what the hardware is sending and what the display is expecting.

There’s also a direct parallel with composite video black levels. Anyone who used a PAL Mega Drive — and I know many of our readers have strong feelings about the PAL Mega Drive, as explored in our PAL Mega Drive Mini review — will remember that composite video from those consoles had its own black level issues depending on the revision of hardware and the television you connected it to. Some setups produced gorgeous, punchy visuals. Others looked washed out and smeared. The variables were different — it was about composite sync levels and the TV’s chroma decoding — but the underlying experience of “why does this not look right?” was identical.

The Game Gear, that power-hungry, battery-devouring rival to the Game Boy, had its own display eccentricities too. Its backlit LCD was genuinely impressive for 1990, but the screen’s colour reproduction varied considerably between units and often looked quite different when you saw screenshots in magazines compared to what appeared on the actual hardware. Those of us who tracked down the more obscure corners of the PAL Game Gear library often noticed that some games looked far better than others simply because of how different developers had accounted for the screen’s characteristics when designing their colour palettes. Display calibration isn’t a modern concern. It’s been there the whole time.

The Analogue Dock and How HDMI Output Actually Works

The Analogue Dock, released alongside various Pocket firmware updates and sold separately for around £69–£75 in the UK (when you can get it — stock availability remains characteristically Analogue, which is to say: unpredictable), converts the Pocket’s output to HDMI so you can play on a television. It also provides USB ports for controllers and charges the Pocket while docked. In concept, it’s very similar to the Nintendo Switch dock — a simple pass-through that handles the signal conversion and power delivery while the handheld does the actual computing.

The HDMI specification itself is where things get interesting. HDMI carries video as digital data, and that data includes metadata — information about how the signal should be interpreted. This metadata includes colour space information (the range of colours being used), frame rate, resolution, and yes, colour range. When a device sends an HDMI signal, it’s supposed to include in that metadata whether the signal is Limited or Full range. The display is then supposed to read that metadata and configure itself accordingly.

In theory, this should make the colour range problem impossible. The device tells the TV what it’s sending; the TV does the right thing. In practice, this handshake goes wrong surprisingly often. Some televisions ignore the metadata and apply a fixed interpretation based on their settings. Some devices send incorrect metadata. Some firmware updates change what metadata gets sent without users being aware. And some users — quite reasonably — have manually configured their TV settings in ways that override the automatic detection.

Why “Auto” Doesn’t Always Help

Most televisions have an “Auto” setting for HDMI colour range, which is supposed to read the incoming metadata and configure accordingly. This works a lot of the time. It does not work all of the time. The reasons are numerous: bugs in the TV firmware, bugs in the source device firmware, HDMI cables that don’t properly carry the handshake data (more relevant at 4K/HDR but occasionally an issue at lower resolutions), and the general reality that “auto” in consumer electronics sometimes means “our best guess” rather than “a reliable technical process.”

The Analogue Pocket’s HDMI output is at 1080p (with some core-dependent variation). At this resolution, you’re well within the reliable range of any HDMI cable made in the last decade, so cable quality is rarely the culprit here. The issue is almost always the range setting itself.

Does the Analogue Dock Affect Picture Quality Beyond Colour Range?

This is worth addressing because some users, having fixed the colour range, still feel the TV image doesn’t look as good as the handheld screen. The Pocket’s built-in display is a 3.5-inch 1600×1440 LCD — an extraordinary pixel density for a handheld and quite possibly the best screen ever put on a Game Boy-sized device. When you dock it and output to a TV, you’re taking that signal and scaling it up to fit a much larger display. The FPGA is doing the heavy lifting of running the cores, and the output to HDMI is a different signal path than the one driving the internal screen.

Some users find that certain screen filters and display options available in handheld mode aren’t available or behave differently in docked mode, and the TV’s own upscaling can introduce softness or processing artefacts depending on how your set handles the signal. If you want to understand more about how the Pocket compares to other ways of playing these games, our six weeks with a modded GBA piece explores some of these display differences in a way that might reframe your expectations.

Colour Range and FPGA: Why Accuracy Matters Here More Than Anywhere

The Analogue Pocket isn’t just an emulator. This is important and worth spelling out clearly, because it changes the stakes of the display accuracy conversation considerably. The Pocket uses FPGA — Field Programmable Gate Array — technology to recreate the original hardware at the circuit level. Rather than running software that approximates what a Game Boy does, the Pocket’s FPGA is configured to be a Game Boy, or a Game Gear, or a Neo Geo Pocket Colour, at the electrical level. The timing, the pixel rendering, the audio — all of it is happening as the original hardware would have done it, not as a software interpretation of that behaviour.

This is why the Pocket is beloved by a certain kind of collector and why it justifies its premium price point for the people who care about these things most. If you want to understand the difference between FPGA and emulation in more detail, and why it matters for specific systems, our guide to the best FPGA handheld for SNES games under £150 covers the technical distinction in accessible terms.

The relevance to colour range is this: if you’re using an FPGA device specifically because you want the most accurate possible representation of how these games looked and sounded on original hardware, then getting the colour range wrong undermines the entire point. A washed-out image on a TV isn’t just aesthetically unpleasant — it’s a fundamentally inaccurate representation of the game. The colours the artist chose, the contrast ratios they designed around, the way dark areas create atmosphere — all of that is compromised by a misconfigured signal. Fixing the colour range setting isn’t a minor tweak. For an accuracy-focused device like the Pocket, it’s close to essential.

Original Game Boy games were designed to be seen on a greenish, blurry, low-contrast display — which is part of why the Pocket’s screen filters that simulate the original DMG screen are so beloved. But Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games were designed on proper development monitors with proper contrast and colour fidelity. If you’re playing Castlevania: Circle of the Moon or Golden Sun with washed-out contrast, you’re not seeing what the developers saw. You’re seeing a degraded version of their work.

The Monitors vs Televisions Divide: When Full Range Is Actually Correct

I mentioned earlier that the answer might flip if you’re connecting to a PC monitor rather than a television. Let me explain why, because this catches a lot of people out — particularly those who’ve set up the Pocket dock on a desk setup rather than a living room TV.

PC monitors, historically and by default, use Full range (0–255). This is because they were designed to display the output of computer graphics cards, which output Full range by default. When you connect your Analogue Pocket dock to a PC monitor via HDMI, the monitor is almost certainly interpreting the signal as Full range. In that case, you want the Pocket to output Full range to match.

If the Pocket is set to Limited range and you’re connecting to a Full range monitor, you’ll get the opposite problem to the TV situation: the image will look too dark and too contrasty. Blacks will be crushed, shadow detail will disappear, and bright areas will look unnaturally bright. This is less common as a complaint because most Pocket owners are primarily using the dock on televisions, but if you’ve moved your setup to a monitor and suddenly things look different — now you know why.

The practical matrix looks like this:

• TV via HDMI → Set Pocket to Limited range (or TV to Limited input range)
• PC monitor via HDMI → Set Pocket to Full range (or monitor to Full range input)
• TV with PC mode / game mode enabled → May behave like a monitor — test both
• Capture card setup → Depends on the card; most expect Limited range, same as TV

The “PC mode” or “game mode” on modern televisions adds another variable. These modes, designed to reduce input lag and processing for gaming, sometimes change how the TV interprets incoming signals. A TV in game mode may behave more like a monitor for colour range purposes. This is why testing both settings and trusting your eyes is ultimately the most reliable approach — the correct setting is whichever one makes the image look like you’d expect a properly calibrated display to look.

How to Tell If Your Picture Looks Correct After Fixing It

Once you’ve changed the setting, how do you know you’ve actually fixed it rather than just made a different kind of wrong? This is a fair question, especially if you’ve been staring at the washed-out image for so long that your eyes have adjusted to it.

The Simple Visual Test

Load any game with a title screen that has a clearly black background and clearly white or bright text. The original Tetris for Game Boy works perfectly for this. The background should be genuinely, deeply black — not dark grey. The text and pieces should be bright and clean. If the background looks grey and the image looks like it’s being displayed through a slight haze, the range is still wrong. When you get it right, the difference is immediately and unambiguously obvious. You don’t need a calibration disc or a colour meter. You’ll know.

The More Thorough Check

For those who want to be more rigorous about it:

• Find a game with dark atmospheric areas — Metroid: Zero Mission or Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow both have genuinely dark underground sections. Shadow detail in these areas should be visible but subtle. If you can’t see anything, you might have over-corrected to Full range when Limited was better for your specific TV.
• Find a game with bright, saturated colour — the opening of Pokémon FireRed or any Mario game. Colours should be vivid and distinct, not washed out or oversaturated.
• Look at a game with a clear white element — menu backgrounds, dialogue boxes. These should be white, not cream or grey.

If all of those look right simultaneously, you’re there. The picture should have proper contrast and proper colour saturation without looking either flat or garish.

Other Reasons Your Analogue Pocket TV Image Might Look Off

Colour range is the most common cause of a washed-out picture, but it’s not the only one. If you’ve fixed the colour range and something still looks wrong, here are the other likely culprits.

Your TV’s Picture Mode

Modern televisions ship with multiple picture presets — “Cinema,” “Standard,” “Vivid,” “Game,” etc. — and some of these modes make dramatic changes to contrast, brightness, colour saturation, and sharpness that can produce a washed-out or over-processed look regardless of the input signal. The “Vivid” mode in particular, which many TVs use as their default because it looks impressive on a showroom floor, often blows out bright areas and can paradoxically make the picture look worse on a lot of content. “Cinema” or “Movie” mode tends to be more colour-accurate and is a better starting point for retro game content. If your TV has a “Game” mode, that reduces processing but doesn’t necessarily optimise for colour accuracy.

Sharpness Settings Set Too High

This is specific to pixel art games but it’s worth mentioning. TVs with high sharpness settings introduce edge enhancement — an artificial sharpening effect that puts bright halos around edges to make the image look crisper. On pixel art, this looks genuinely terrible. It makes crisp pixel edges look like they have a buzzing outline, and it contributes to an overall harshness that reads as the picture looking “wrong.” Set sharpness to zero. You will likely be astonished by how much better it looks.

Your TV’s Motion Smoothing / Interpolation

This one isn’t related to colour range or washout specifically, but it deserves a mention because it’s the other most common reason retro game content looks odd on a modern TV. Motion smoothing (called “TruMotion” on LG, “Motion Flow” on Sony, “Auto Motion Plus” on Samsung) processes the video to add interpolated frames, making everything look unnaturally smooth in a way that people sometimes describe as the “soap opera effect.” On retro games, it creates a deeply unsettling look. Turn it off. It should not be on. It was a mistake to invent it.

The Dock Firmware Itself

Analogue releases firmware updates periodically, and some of these have changed HDMI output behaviour. If you’re running an older firmware version, you may be experiencing a colour range bug that was addressed in a later update. Check the current firmware version at Analogue’s website (analogue.co) and compare it to what your Pocket is running. The update process is straightforward — download the firmware file, put it on a microSD card, and the Pocket installs it on boot. Worth checking if you’ve tried everything else.

The HDMI Cable Itself (Rarely, But Occasionally)

I said earlier that cable quality is rarely the issue at 1080p, and that’s true. But “rarely” isn’t “never.” If you’re using a very old HDMI cable, a very cheap no-brand cable, or a cable that’s been bent or stressed at a connector, it’s worth swapping it for something you’re confident in. The £8 Amazon Basics cable or equivalent will be absolutely fine. You don’t need anything exotic. But if you’re using the cable that came in a drawer from 2008, consider upgrading it.

Why This Problem Matters Beyond the Analogue Pocket

Understanding the colour range issue on the Analogue Pocket gives you a tool that’s useful across a huge range of retro gaming setups. The same mismatch problem appears in countless other configurations, and knowing what you’re looking for means you can diagnose and fix it quickly wherever it appears.

Any device that connects to a TV via HDMI can potentially encounter this: the Raspberry Pi-based retro gaming setups running RetroPie or Batocera, the MiSTer FPGA setup (which has its own colour range settings), capture cards, and yes — the Analogue Nomad and other upcoming Analogue products. As we covered in our piece on Analogue Nomad UK pricing, Analogue’s product range is expanding and the TV output question is increasingly relevant across their lineup.

It also appears on retro consoles connected via HDMI adapters. If you’ve ever connected an original PlayStation, N64, or Mega Drive to your modern TV using an HDMI adapter and noticed the picture looked flat, there’s a very good chance the adapter’s output range doesn’t match your TV’s expected input range. The fix is the same: find the colour range or HDMI range setting on the TV, or look for a similar setting in the adapter’s own configuration if it has one.

The Miyoo Mini Plus, which we gave an extensive review — and it’s the device that represents the other end of the value spectrum from the Pocket — doesn’t have this issue in the same way because it doesn’t have TV output at all. But for any device that does output to a screen, understanding the colour range question is genuinely foundational. You can find that Miyoo Mini Plus review here if you want to see how a much more affordable device handles (or sidesteps) these display considerations.

The Broader Pattern: Why Retro Gaming Tech Always Requires This Much Thought

I want to sit with this for a moment, because I think it says something true about retro gaming as a hobby that’s worth acknowledging.

There’s a version of this hobby that should be simple. You want to play old games. You buy the hardware or the device that plays them. You plug it in and you play. The end. But it is almost never actually that simple, and I don’t think that’s a bug — I think it’s genuinely characteristic of what retro gaming is. The games you’re trying to play were made for specific hardware, in specific television standards, with specific signal types, for specific regional markets. Every layer of translation between “the original experience” and “what you’re seeing in your living room in 2025” introduces variables. Managing those variables is part of the hobby, whether you want it to be or not.

We’ve written about this pattern in various ways across the site. The PAL betrayal — that slow, flat, compromised experience British players had with so many games throughout the 1990s — was the same pattern. The shops that controlled PAL game availability, which we explored in our piece on GAME, Woolworths and the PAL survival story, were another layer of mediation between the game as designed and the game as experienced. The colour range problem on an Analogue Pocket dock is a much smaller and more solvable version of the same basic condition: these devices weren’t all designed for each other, and making them work together correctly requires understanding the gaps between them.

The Analogue Pocket is, in many ways, the most philosophically serious attempt yet made by a consumer hardware company to bridge one of those gaps — the gap between original hardware accuracy and modern convenience. FPGA technology means the Game Boy Advance games you play on it are running on hardware that behaves identically to the original at the silicon level. The cartridge slot takes real cartridges. The inputs feel right. And then you connect it to a TV and find out that HDMI colour range is still a thing you have to understand. It’s almost funny, in a very retro gaming way.

The lesson I’ve drawn from years in this hobby — and in games writing, where I’ve seen every generation of the same debates cycle through — is that the detail matters, and engaging with the detail is actually rewarding rather than frustrating once you shift your frame. The person who understands why their Pocket looks washed out on the TV, and fixes it, and understands the principle well enough to apply it elsewhere, gets more out of the hobby than the person who either doesn’t notice or gives up. Not because they’re superior, but because they’re equipped. Knowledge compounds in this hobby in a way that I find genuinely satisfying.

A Quick Note on HDR and Whether It Affects Any of This

High Dynamic Range — HDR — is worth addressing because modern televisions talk about it constantly and some users wonder whether it changes the colour range equation. The short version: the Analogue Pocket’s dock does not output HDR. It outputs a standard dynamic range (SDR) 1080p signal. HDR is a separate and more complex colour standard that uses different metadata and different tone mapping, and the Pocket isn’t doing any of that.

What HDR can do, if it’s incorrectly triggered or if your TV’s settings are confused about what it’s receiving, is make the picture look extremely wrong. Some televisions, when receiving a signal on an HDMI port configured for HDR input, will apply HDR tone mapping to an SDR signal and produce a dark, undersaturated, generally terrible-looking image. If your TV has a specific HDR mode setting per HDMI port, make sure the port you’re using for the Pocket dock is set to SDR, not HDR. This is a less common cause of the problem than a simple colour range mismatch, but it does happen, particularly on newer televisions where HDR-related settings are more numerous and the auto-detection is more aggressive.

Summing Up the Fix and What It Teaches You

Let me bring this home cleanly.

If your Analogue Pocket looks washed out on a TV: go to Settings → Display → HDMI Colour Range on the Pocket and switch it to Limited. That will almost certainly fix it immediately and completely. If you’re on a PC monitor instead of a TV, try Full range. If neither looks quite right, check your TV’s own HDMI colour range setting and make sure it matches what the Pocket is sending. And if you’ve fixed the range but it still looks off, work through the TV picture mode, sharpness, and motion smoothing settings before concluding something more exotic is going on.

This is a fixable problem. The Pocket is excellent hardware, and when it’s properly configured it produces a TV image that does real justice to these games — particularly the GBA library, which genuinely shines at 1080p with the right settings. Don’t let a single misconfigured option make you doubt the device.

But beyond the fix: understand that this problem is part of a family of signal compatibility issues that have followed retro gaming throughout its history. From PAL slowdown to composite black levels to now HDMI colour range, the challenge of getting a game signal from hardware to screen correctly has always involved more variables than it should. The Analogue Pocket is the best handheld retro gaming device ever made — and even it has this gotcha waiting for you at the setup stage. Once you know about it, you’re past it. That’s the deal the hobby always offers: learn the thing, and then the thing stops being in your way.

Now go and play something. Golden Sun has been waiting long enough.