Boot it up and you’re met with its custom operating system, 3Dos. Like the console itself, it takes a strikingly minimalist approach, all precise white pixel text on a stark black background. The OS as a whole is still cooking—more on that later—but it’s already showing signs of being a game archivist’s dream. It builds a library of each cart you play, and displays information such as developer, publisher, the region version of the cart you’ve inserted, how many players it supports, and more. By default, there’s no art for the cart library, but you can add icons manually and it’ll match the image to the cart accordingly—my review unit had some included to showcase the feature, and you can expect community-led image libraries almost immediately at launch.
Looking Good for Their Age
I was skeptical of how well the Analogue3D would hold up when it comes to actually playing decades-old games, but that cynicism was instantly shattered. I spent over a week throwing more than a dozen games at it, a mix of US and UK carts, and it’s accurately identified and run every single one of them.
The only carts that threw up some issues were UK copies of 007: The World is Not Enough and Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, which initially refused to launch. In such cases, the Analogue3D presents a black screen, which is a bit disorienting as you’re left wondering if it’s stalled, crashed, or is just still loading. A quick pass of the cart cleaners and the old faithful trick of blowing on it sorted the problem though.
The lack of any region lock is a particular delight—for instance, Wave Race 64 suffered from slowdown on the PAL release, but I’ve been playing the NTSC version without issue, while also getting thoroughly engrossed in Ogre Battle 64, which never got a UK release at the time. It’s also nice, if a little strange, to play Star Fox 64, rather than the re-named Lylat Wars version I grew up with.