The Game Boy and Game Boy Color systems have had a very active "afterlife." Screen mods, homebrew games and clone consoles are just some of the developments that have gained prominence in the past 10+ years. The idea of cloning a Game Boy or Game Boy Color is not a new one, hardware clones have been around for around 10 years. More flexible FPGA technology has resulting in two consoles which can play original GB/GBC cartridges, the Analogue Pocket (2021) and the Funny Playing FPGBC (2023). Now a new challenger enters the arena in the form of the Chromatic from a company called ModRetro. Let's see what it has to offer and how it measures up against the competition.
ModRetro's Entry into the Market
The company releasing the Chromatic is called ModRetro, Inc. ModRetro is headed by Palmer Luckey, who had previously risen to prominence through his work developing the Oculus Rift VR Headset technology. Luckey states he was an early pioneer in GB/GBC/GBA screen mods and system transplants (GBC into a DMG for example). His success with Occulus Rift demonstrates that he has the engineering competence to bring a quality product to market and his tinkering with the original Nintendo hardware shows that he knows the system he is designing.
Luckey is a billionaire who has said in reference to the Chromatic that "I do not need your money" and predicts he will probably lose money on the project. Of course self-made billionaires do not enter or remain in that exclusive club by frittering away money on unprofitable projects. It is inconceivable that Luckey has not calculated the price and sales required to make a profit on the Chromatic and whether its development represents a sound business decision. The system costs as much to develop for one person as it does for several thousand, so even if he loses money the loss will be considerably less impactful than it otherwise may have been. Even if the Chromatic itself is not profitable, if the Chromatic is successful it should engender goodwill that could make future products more profitable. ModRetro partnered with Gamestop to sell the Chromatic in its stores and online, a first for an FPGA console. He has stated that he does not know if he will make more Chromatics after the 1st Edition sells out, but many people and companies say similar things.
As the Chromatic is not entering a virgin playing field, it needs to do something to distinguish itself from its predecessors, which are still available for sale. Pocket retails for $219.99 and FPGBC assembled runs to $99.00 (kit form is currently $80.60 for the more industrious among us). So what does Chromatic offer for $199.00? Can it stand out from an increasingly crowded field? There is also competition of a sort from the many, many Android-based handhelds from companies like Anbernic and PowKiddy and the software emulation included with the Nintendo Switch or available on devices like on the Steam Deck. There are no shortage of ways to play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games on the go.
I acknowledge that with the Chromatic there is a factor which some people may consider to be the "elephant in the room." Luckey is also a key figure in a company called Anduril Industries, a U.S. military contractor. Anduril specializes in automated weapons technology, a.k.a. lethal drones. Some people have scruples about supporting a console connected in some way, however tangentially, to the Military-industrial complex. Additionally it is well-known that he has long been a supporter of the President-elect. One might question the wisdom of having such a polarizing figure as the front-man for a product of this nature, but one must work with the tools one has. How many people would buy a console at this price like this from a company with no proven track record or a lack of solid financial backing? Remember the Intellivision Amico, the Coleco Chameleon and the ZX Spectrum Vega+? They all failed from one or the other or both. Gamestop listed the Amico for preorder only for that to turn into a refund headache so undoubtedly the retailer would be "one-bitten, twice shy."
Brief Overview of the Benefits of FPGA Simulation
The Chromatic, like the Pocket, FPGBC and other FPGA-based consoles and home computers offer something which software emulation consoles do not, the ability to interact with cartridge games in the same manner as the original consoles. They read from the ROM as instructions are executed and data transferred and write to any non-volatile save memory in the cartridge. They are the best legal way to play games on original media.
There is a hardware clone of the Game Boy Color, the Kongfeng GB Boy Colour, but its hardware is fixed in the integrated circuit and bugs cannot be fixed. There are other consoles like the Atari 7800+ and the Polymega but they just dump the cartridges and run the ROMs on a software emulator running on hardware inside the console.
An FPGA can simulate original hardware down to the circuit level and can be reprogrammed to fix bugs and issues. As it is processing simulated hardware in real time with little to no overhead, it can do so with a minimum of lag. High accuracy and low input latency can be achieved by FPGAs for reasonable cost, but it is not guaranteed. The MiSTer project when it was in its early days had many inaccurate cores and did not prioritize minimizing input lag. Later in this article we will see how the Chromatic stacks up against its competitors in both categories.
Shipping and Packaging
I preordered the Chromatic in early September but preorders had been taken since at least June 3. The Chromatic made its way into Gamestop stores as of December 1 while my preorder shipping notification did not appear until December 3. I did not receive mine until December 10 but as I had preordered so late I could not expect to be high in the processing queue. The shipping was handled by a combination of DHL and USPS, so shipping may have been a little on the slow side. Gamestop offered free shipping, ModRetro's cost me $12.00 While ModRetro did not charge the sales tax that Gamestop would have, the state still requires its payment. The shipping version does not come with an ugly Gamestop price sticker at least.
The Chromatic comes in a box with artwork in a hand-drawn style, with lots of color, trying to evoke the doodles that a young video game player may draw while having to sit through a boring math class in school. It is an eye-catching and whimsical design with a cool fold out cover that is held in place by a magnet. I appreciate the clear triangle window that is embedded on the front of the box to show the color of the console's shell. The panoramic drawings on the inside cover, pixel art and stickers are appealing. The box is a keeper.
Chromatic's Features
Screen
The screen's design was intended to come as close to the GBC's original screen as possible, including coming very close to replicating the unusual color gamut of the original screens. The FPGBC offers optional grid line display options but it does not really replicate the color gamut of the original GBC screen. Pocket uses screen filters to add grid lines and can closely approximate the color gamut of the original GBC screen. The whites are purer on he Chromatic's screen than Pocket's screen, but the whites were not particularly pure on the GBC's screen. The Chromatic's screen measures 2.56" on the diagonal compared to 2.33" for the GBC, 3.5" for Pocket and 2.875" for FPGBC (2.625" in 4x Mode).
The screen deserves its praises, it looks fantastic, it gives authentic colors and provides texture to pixels. It gets very bright and can be played in sunlight, although you might want to turn the brightness up a notch or two past the midpoint if you are at the beach. It is also lag-free. 144p's Test Suite has a manual lag test as do other test programs based on the 240p Test Suite. I can get consistent results of 1frame or less, which is comparable to my scores with a NES being displayed on a CRT and the original GBC, FPGBC and Pocket.
ModRetro has stated that the FPGA in the Chromatic will be open sourced to allow other creators to port cores to it. Source code for the FPGA has been made available. They will have to contend with the low-resolution of the Chromatic's custom screen. This will make it difficult to port cores other than Game Gear (160x144) and Atari Lynx (160x102, but Chromatic is one button short). The Game Gear was able to play Master System games but had to scale them down to the lower resolution of the GG's screen.
The premium feel of the console does not end with the screen. The console's enclosure is made of a painted magnesium alloy. Metal shells are nothing new, Boxy Pixel makes anodized aluminum shells to a very high standard but they are expensive shell replacements. There was a limited edition of Analogue Pockets with aluminum shells but at $499.00 the price was beyond the reach of many people. One must take some care not to scratch a metal shell, whether its painted or anodized the color can be scraped away by rough contact with a hard object.
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| Japanese variants (courtesy of ModRetro, also English variants shown above) |
The Chromatic's shell comes six standard color choices (Bubblegum, Leaf, Inferno, Midnight, Volt and Wave), with the standard six offering English or Japanese button labels. There is also a "Logan Paul Edition" exclusive to the ModRetro site and the GameStop Exclusive edition which is, as its name suggests, can only be purchased from GameStop. There are fourteen variations of the Chromatic available at this time.
I was not especially keen for the color combinations on offer for the Chromatic. The pastel-like colors just did not appeal to me personally, aesthetically-speaking. The GameStop variant's color scheme looked the best of the bunch in my opinion but I had already preordered from ModRetro and did not want to go through the hassle of canceling my order just for a color swap. I chose the Bubblegum model because it looked the most fun and unusual of the bunch. Having received a unit in my hands I admit the enclosure has grown on me.
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| Logan Paul and Gamestop Variants (courtesy of ModRetro & Gamestop) |
The size, shape and the functionality of the Chromatic is designed to replicate the GBC as much as possible. The online manual goes over the console's features fully. The Chromatic's dimensions are similar to the GBC, mainly differing in that the Chromatic is a little thicker and flatter over the length of the console and a tad longer compared to the original, but only by a millimeter or two. The face buttons are the same as a GBC or FPGBC but a bit larger and the start and select buttons are angled. By having the speaker be downward firing instead of direct firing, the Chromatic allows the buttons to take up more console real estate. Man hands should have less to complain about.
One review (The Retro Future) complained that the cartridges wobble when inserted. This should not normally be a problem, your hands do not naturally go near that area when you are using the console. Metal cases may scratch cartridges without some extra space in between cartridge and enclosure, something that was an issue with the original aluminum-enclosure of the Analogue Nt. You can also insert a GB or GBC cartridge inside the slot backwards but no harm will be done, the cartridge connector is only single-sided.
No side of the Chromatic is featureless. The left side has a Link Port, the top has a sliding power switch and an IR transceiver window, the right side has the volume wheel and the menu button, the bottom houses the headphone jack, an LED charging/status indicator, the USB Type-C port and the single speaker cutout. Each side also has a hole for charms or a lanyard, and given the metal enclosure this hole should be more durable than on plastic enclosures.
The D-Pad is very responsive and handles diagonals well. This is important for games like Operation C and Contra: The Alien Wars where the difference between Down and Down + Right/Left can be death. The A & B buttons are snappy. The Start and Select buttons on the Chromatic are plastic over membrane like the other buttons. Original GBCs and the FPGBC use pure membrane buttons. Its power switch is a simple on/off switch, no holding down buttons to enable a sleep mode. The switch powers up and down the console instantly and the games start up instantly.
The board layout is not without issue. The trace for the Left directional runs almost directly underneath the pivot for the D-Pad. Some people have speculated that over time that pivot will wear on the trace and eventually sever it with one photo showing some wear near the trace. ModRetro responded that the pivot is not directly on top of the trace and is unlikely to be an issue but they will cover it under warranty and revise the board to reroute the trace. After three days of playing and testing I observed no issue with wear once I opened the console. A piece of nonconductive tape might help prolong the life of the trace.
Communications
The Link Port has can accept a connector with a nub but those are only found on GBA link cables. (Of course there is no reason to use GBA link cables with GB & GBCs, is there...) Analogue's Link Cable works fine with Chromatic's Link Port and is what I mainly used for testing. The Chromatic's Link Port has a rather tighter grip than my other consoles, which is important as your left index finger is more likely to nudge the connector as it sits lower on the console than an original GBC or FPGBC. Unlike the FPGBC, the Chromatic has a functioning IR transceiver (as does Pocket).
Battery & Power Options
The rear has the cartridge slot, a battery compartment and cover. The console takes three AA batteries and comes with three ModRetro-branded Alkaline batteries. The original GBC took two AAs but it did not have to power backlit screens and FPGAs. Four to six hours is the quoted playtime on a fresh set of batteries. All three batteries go the same way, with positive to the left. ModRetro wanted to allow people to be able to play the Chromatic for as far into the future as AA batteries are being made. Pocket and FPGBC use custom rechargeable battery packs but both companies offer replacement batteries.
ModRetro intends to release a rechargeable battery pack after launch that can be charged through the Type-C port. There are large contacts for a rechargeable battery pack visible in the cavity when there are no batteries present and the battery cover is removed. You can transition between battery and USB power without risking the console powering down, just make sure you connect the new power supply source before removing the old. A trio of freshly charged (and rather old) Eneloop rechargeable AAs were able to get the console running. I was also able to get the Chromatic running with a portable charger power bank with either its 1A or 2A port.
USB Video
For now the Type-C's port is limited to powering the console, firmware updates and video streaming. When plugged into a PC, the Chromatic will appear as a webcam and the video being displayed can be captured like any other video input. No drivers are required and the built-in screen will remain on. Direct input to a display without capturing software may not be possible and could induce lag. Batteries are not required when the console is plugged in.
The video recording function works very well with OBS, I just added the Chromatic as a Video Capture Device, checked the Flip Vertically box and I had a 160x144 image. The image is sharp and when captured at its native resolution there is no interpolation and the number of colors captured is the same as the number of colors displayed if you use lossless capture settings. I made a capture of the console's video and audio, focusing on the frame blending, here. If you do not use custom upscaling settings, the resulting video will be potato quality on your stream.
The video output from the USB is being sent at 60Hz and the Game Boy and Game Boy Color's screen refresh is 59.7225Hz. In order for the USB video to remain in sync with the GBC, it must duplicate a frame once about every four seconds. Using the Stopwatch test from the 144p Test Suite, I could see from a capture of just over the first second (sixty frames), that frames 18 and 61 were duplicated and frames 16 and 63 were dropped. This seems to account for the poorer rendition of flicker with the USB video output.
Audio Output
The built-in speaker did its job and the resulting audio was much louder than an original GBC without distortion, unlike the FPGBC. Pocket has side mounted stereo speakers, which are very clear, can get rather loud and are distortion free. The headphone jack drove a pair of cheap Sony headphones well enough and stereo is supported as the Game Boy consoles were always stereo from the headphone jack. Stereo panning was correctly assigned as demonstrated by Space Invaders.
Audio input support is not provided by the Type-C connector at this time, you must use the headphone jack to capture audio for streaming or recording. When the headphone jack was plugged into my PC's line input alongside the USB cable, the audio was extremely noisy. Using a USB Type-C to Type-C cable and connecting the Chromatic directly to one of my PC motherboard's USB Type-C ports reduced the noise but could not eliminate it. You can hear the noise in my first video, linked above. Only disconnecting the USB cable eliminated the noise on the line input. I did not hear the noise from the headphones with the USB cable connected. Webcams can of course transmit video and audio and do so digitally over USB, even my cheap-ass Logitech C270 HD Webcam can transmit sound adequately. I was able to find a workaround for the audio quality issue, but the process is cumbersome.
Menu
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| Menu Screens and Options 1 |
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| Menu Screens and Options 2 |
When the menu is active the game running underneath is not paused and the buttons will not respond to the game, only to the menu. The menu button is not something that can be casually pressed, it requires a bit more direct pressure than the side of your right index finger will likely provide.
Pack-in Game, Other Homebrew and Accessories
The Chromatic's value is enhanced because it includes an exclusive pack-in cartridge game, a new, officially-licensed version of Tetris. I was originally going to review this version of Tetris in this post, but as this post was getting very long I spun it off into its own post. I have seen videos of review units which came with a pair of charms, but the Gamestop and Preorder units do not come with any.
ModRetro offers other GB & GBC homebrew games on cartridge for sale separately on its website. Of the 10 games, 4 are monochrome games, 2 are hybrid games and the other 4 are color-only. Those games which support saving, like Tetris, have save support through the use of FRAM (Ferroelectric RAM, a.k.a. FeRAM). FRAM does not rely on a battery to store data when the power is turned off and has much faster access time compared to Flash memory. Durability may or may not be on par with SRAM but it should be able to last orders of magnitude of cycles above that of flash memory and data can be written to FRAM quickly. No batteries need to be desoldered and replaced when using these cartridges. I did not buy any of these cartridges, so I cannot comment on the games' quality. They come with boxes and printed manuals and run from $29.99-44.99 each.
Based on the Tetris cartridge, ModRetro's cartridges look to be high quality. The Tetris cartridge contains 2MiB of flash memory (Tetris only uses 256KiB), 32KiB of FRAM, a small FPGA (for bankswitching), a 256KiB Serial flash and 4 logic level translator chips. The contacts have a gold finish and the 3v chips used are in-production, not 5v part pulls from e-waste.
Also available on the ModRetro site are Koss Prota Pro headphones in matching colors to the Chromatic's shells. Gamestop has a silver pair to match their color. I did not order one, I'm risking enough being seen in public with a pink and purple console, nevermind a set of matching headphones! I might as well just wear a sign on my back that says "rob me" on the subway if I showed off such a combination. The reviews I have read of the headphones come to a consensus that they are excellent value for money ($49.00) if not quite audiophile-grade or studio standbys.
Chromatic's Internals
It is unknown if this console will be able to run ROMs. The manual site shows what appears to be a microSD connector in the console as do the units sent out for review. The Gamestop and Preorder units do not but the solder pads are there to add one in. The console also has a Bluetooth/Wi-Fi module but no information has been given out about any functionality it may provide in the future. One might suggest that the Wi-Fi/BT module may allow for external gamepad input while the Chromatic is hooked up to an external display but the functionality will not be implemented unless they have sound output over USB Type-C and the output no longer functions as a webcam. There is a trace which is shaped like a Wi-Fi antenna on top of the Chromatic's PCB.
The GBC only had 48KiB of RAM (32KiB CPU + 16KiB PPU), an amount which can be simulated within a decently capable FPGA. In this case the Chromatic's FPGA is a GOWIN GW5A-25, slightly more powerful than the GOWIN GW2A-18 found in the FPGBC. The largest commercial GBC game was 8MiB in size, but only one game reached that amount. The rest are 4MiB or less. There is an 8MiB PSRAM chip inside the console, so it theoretically could load ROMs. The FPGBC cannot load ROMs, it does not have a RAM chip, but Analogue Pocket has 96.25MiB of combined RAM and an microSD slot, so it can load ROMs. Pocket can support save states and sleep/wake for cartridge games, the Chromatic and FPGBC do not. All three consoles have logic level translator chips so you need not worry about cartridges being damaged by too-low voltage levels, if that was ever a thing.
Openness is a theme of Chromatic and applies to hardware and software (see below). The console was designed to be easy to open and mod. There are files which give dimensions of the buttons, the D-pad, the membranes and even the shell to assist modders with rolling their own tangible elements. If you are as keen on the button colors as I am, someone will probably offer replacements at some point. All screws in the console are tri-wing, which Nintendo used in its handhelds beginning at some point during the DMG Game Boy's life. There are four kinds of screws used in the console, but it is easy to keep track of which go where. ModRetro even links to an iFixit article showing you how to disassemble the console and it is as easy as it looks.
If you open your console, take care when reinserting the power button over the switch and the connector for the screen. I lay the console on a piece of cloth so I do not risk scratching the screen. Nintendo only used tri-wings for the exterior screws in its consoles, requiring you to switch to a Phillips screwdriver once you opened the enclosure. ModRetro made it more convenient to disassemble the console by using one type of screw for everything. The FPGBC is not quite as easy to take apart because its screen and battery connectors are smaller and trickier to fasten and remove. While not especially difficult to disassemble, Pocket has a thermal pad for the main FPGA and the connectors for the screen and the shoulder buttons are a bit fiddly to reattach.
ModRetro has confirmed that Chromatic's FPGA GBC core uses the MiSTer core. The FPGBC's core may or may not be based on MiSTer but no firmware source is provided. Analogue Pocket can run its native GB/GBC core via the cartridge slot while also offering GB/GBC cores from third party developers through openFPGA. A developer with the handle Budude2 has ported the MiSTer GB & GBC cores to Pocket via openFPGA and the developer Spiritualized has offered their own GB & GBC cores as well.
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| Left Column: Right & A + B Right Column: Left & A + B Top Row: USB Color Correction On Bottom Row: USB Color Correction Off |
Support for original cartridges has been reported to be excellent. The Chromatic, like the Pocket, does not require a power cycle to swap cartridges. FPGBC needs a power cycle. I would not recommend hot swapping cartridges with save memory, it may be lost during the brief transition where things go haywire. I have tried my modest collection of about 30 carts and found only three issues. In such collections, including mine, one typically finds games using the four common mappers (MBC1, 2, 3 & 5) but you can find games with Rumble support, Real Time Clocks and even an Accelerometer. There is also the bespoke Game Boy Camera. I tried unusual cartridges like Pokemon Pinball (rumble), Pokemon Silver (RTC), the Game Boy Camera and Robot Poncots: Star Version (Hudson HuC-3 mapper), Kirby's Tilt 'N Tumble (accelerometer & MBC7). All but the last worked properly. Unfortunately I do not have a Pocket Sonar to test.
Austin Powers - Welcome to my Underground Lair! would crash in various ways when run as a cart, EverDrive ran fine. Pocket also has this issue, FPGBC works fine. Trying the rock-paper-scissors game will make it do weird things every time. The cartridge looks like a normal MBC5 cartridge but has an axial capacitor that looks like a factory bodge which is not seen on other boards.
Kirby's Tilt 'n Tumble would not calibrate the motion sensor properly, to keep Kirby from rolling one had to hold the console at an angle instead of flat. Pocket will calibrate properly, when it lies flat, Kirby is still. FPGBC does not have this issue anymore. Because Chromatic has a flatter bottom than an original GBC or FPGBC, it should be able to calibrate the motion sensor perfectly more easily than those consoles. If I hold the console at an angle when calibrating the sensor in the same directions to the drift that occurs when the console is laid flat, Kirby becomes much more controllable. Ideal calibration is difficult to dial in when the console is not laid flat.
Wario Land II, the original monochrome version, a friend of mine told me the catridge would run but not display any graphics. It worked fine off an EverDrive.
I do not own any unlicensed Game Boy or Game Boy Color games, they are pretty rare. Elliot Coll and Stuart Ashens reported that all their unlicensed cartridges worked except for Sachen/Commin cartridges. Sachen monochrome cartridges do not work in a real Game Boy Color (except for Beast Master) because Nintendo altered the bootstrap code which checks for legitimate cartridges and as a consequence the Sachen cartridges do not work. Sachen did release GBC enhanced versions of most of their monochrome cartridges with a newer mapper which could accommodate both the old and the new bootstraps, but they are even rarer than the monochrome cartridges. Unfortunately most flash cartridges do not support the memory mapping hardware implemented in the Sachen cartridges. An unlicensed GBC 2-in-1 game from Rocket Games was also reported to have no issues.
Compatibility with Monochrome Game Boy Games
The Chromatic simulates a GBC and only a GBC, so it also comes with all the GBC's incompatibilities and bugs with monochrome GB games. I have previously identified those here. The Chromatic uses the MiSTer GBC core and MiSTer has a GB core which does not have those issues, so a port of the GB core would solve those issues.
Frame Blending
The Chromatic's frame blending does not completely eliminate flicker with monochrome GB games. Some GB games rapidly alternated colors on background graphics to simulate transparency by relying on the slow LCD reaction time of the original monochrome displays. Chikyuu Kaihou Gun ZAS, Serpent and Wave Race will still show noticeable flicker when the function is turned on, but it should be tolerable for most. The original GBC screens also showed flicker with these games, but it is somewhat less noticeable due to the lack of a backlight and some interlacing properties of the GBC's screen. It appears that the Chromatic's developers were trying to simulate the GBC's flicker with its 3:1 frame blend. Pocket and FPGBC use a 2:1 frame blend.
GBC games do not use transparency effects as prominently, you can see them when you cut grass and Bow Wow's chain in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, in the bubbles in the bath houses in Shantae and for the some of the balls and shadows in 3D Pocket Pool. The flicker is only potentially distracting with 3D Pocket Pool.
Flash Cartridge Support
Flash cart support is also pretty good. John Hancock reported that the Chromatic does not work with his EZ Flash Junior. I do not own that device but several reddit users have reported issues with it. I do own an EverDrive GB and an EverDrive GB X7, both work flawlessly. I could not find any graphical or audio bugs with other games using the EverDrive GB X7 after extended testing, even those which are known to cause other FPGA consoles issues. Some older EverDrive GB X-series cartridges may not work with Analogue Pockets but others, such as mine have no issue in Pocket. My X7 also has no issue with the FPGBC and the current firmware (v1.10) but refused to work on the prior firmware. My original ED GB will not flash games correctly when in an FPGBC and the current firmware but will run games flashed by another console. One reviewer, 8bitjoystick, stated his X7 did not work in the Chromatic, but three other reviewers, Madlittlepixel, MetalJesusRocks and Game Junction said theirs worked fine. Posts on r/ModRetroChromatic suggest that FPGA v06s might be the only ones affected, the current shipping version is v07.
Link Port
Compatibility with the Link Port and its peripherals should also be considered. Game Link games worked well via a direct link. Magical Drop's 2 player mode is a glitchy mess when run as a cartridge on Pocket or FPGBC but plays without issue on Chromatic. Tetris and Tetris DX play without issue. ModRetro's Tetris will work with non-Chromatic GBC-compatible systems with the Link Cable. I tried F-1 Race and Wave Race and they do not have issues when connected directly via Link Cable. I was able to successfully transfer Pokemon in both Gen 1 and Gen 2 games.
IR Transceiver
The IR transceiver was used in quite a few GBC games to trade data, unlock secrets and in one case, Chee Chai Alien, it was required to play the game. Some games can even communicate with non-GBC hardware, like Pokémon Pikachu 2. I used the IRTEST ROM to verify IR signals were being sent and received by the Chromatic. Then I tried it with Mission: Impossible's remote control learning utility, where you point a remote and have the GBC "learn signal", assign it to a button and then "send signal" to the device which belongs to the remote. In this case I used the remote for my Toshiba 27AF45 CRT, as I knew that it works with the game with my original GBC and Pocket. Mission: Impossible worked with the game's utility as well, and I could use Chromatic as a remote for the Toshiba from about up to 4 feet away. The original GBC could send a signal from 5-6 feet but Pocket could only manage 4-6 inches. I was also able to accomplish the Card Pop trading function in Pokemon Trading Card Game with Chromatic and an original GBC, which was something of an ultimate test according to Edge of Emulation.
Game Boy Printer & Four Player Adapter
The Game Boy had several Link Port peripherals, most of which were confined to Japan and are not the most common things. Over here we received the Four Player Adapter and the Game Boy Printer. The Four Player Adapter can be easily adapted to the 2nd Generation Link Port connector and works with original GBCs. The Game Boy Printer uses a 2nd Generation Link Port connector, it worked fine printing out photos in Super Mario Bros. Deluxe and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX. The Four Player Adapter would not work with Chromatic and either F-1 Race or Wave Race, the two games I have which support the adapter (with the EverDrives filling out players 2 and 3.)
Cheat Devices
There are also cartridge based cheat devices such as the Game Genie and Game Sharks which insert themselves in the cartridge slot between the console and the cartridge. I tried a Game Genie, a Game Shark Pro and a Mega Memory Card. The Game Genie would not seat properly on Chromatic due to their respective enclosures, and even if nudged it would not get past the initial boot screen. It works with Pocket but not on the FPGBC. The InterAct GameShark Pro just crashed immediately, it does not work with the FPGBC and will it appear to work in Pocket, the codes would not be applied (I tested an infinite lives code for A Bug's Life stored on the device and it worked in my GBC.) The Mega Memory Card, also by InterAct, worked fine to backup and restore cartridge save game data.
Firmware Updates
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| The Four-Way Contest |
In terms of value compared to an original console, the Chromatic offers much for a similar price point. A used working GBC will probably set you back $60 on a good day, and then you'll probably want to replace the screen. Backlit screen modkits cost about $50-65 and you will also need a replacement shell (unless you like cutting and dremeling) and possibly some buttons and membranes. Don't forget the soldering iron, all the GBC screen replacement kits I know of require soldering at least one wire with one exception, and it is the least impressive of the bunch.
Compared to the FPGBC, Chromatic does pretty much the same things as of this moment in time plus the USB video output. Is the premium quality worth double the price? The FPGBC is a budget product with a price to match and its limitations are far more obvious than the Chromatic's. Factor into the Chromatic's price the inclusion of the Tetris game, probably a $30 value, and the price difference between the two consoles narrows measurably. I do not care for the FPGBC's windowboxed 4x mode, better screens are available which do not have the irritating border between the active screen and the lens. The screen does not try to replicate the color gamut of the original, everything looks saturated. The speaker has distortion at normal listening levels and the buttons are a little small for me these days. Compatibility-wise they are about the same. FPGBC feels cheap in comparison.
As far as a comparison to the Analogue Pocket goes, there is not much in the way of comparison. If the FPGBC is a Kia Forte, then the Chromatic is an Audi A3 and the Pocket is akin to a BMW 330i xDrive. Chromatic simulates one system and simulates it very well, Pocket can officially simulate nine of them (GB, GBC, GBA; with adapters: NGP, NGPC, Lynx, TG16, GG, SMS) and does so very well too. The addition of openFPGA allows for many more systems and cores to be emulated, including other consoles, handhelds, computers and arcade machines. With the Dock you can output any Pocket-generated video (up to 1080p) to any 480p or better monitor or display. In addition, with the Analogizer you can output supported cores, including GB and GBC, from Pocket to 15KHz CRTs.
When I compare the price + shipping between ModRetro and Analogue, I would be paying $45 more for a basic black Pocket than a Chromatic if I were to order both today (the price difference varies by municipality, state, province, territory and country to which the console is being shipped). If you have to make a choice between Pocket and Chromatic, then I think the choice would be obvious for most people. However, if you can afford both devices then I would recommend picking up a Chromatic for a great GBC experience.
Analogue pocket has higher latency- their display is rotated 90 degrees so it's at least +1 frame behind
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