Analogue Nt Mini Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Nintendo fever is back. Pokemon Go is a global sensation, and the incredibly cute $60 NES Classic Mini is poised to be a must-have gift this Christmas.

Yes, it takes actual Nintendo cartridges.

Analogue

But if your Nintendo nostalgia runs deep — and we mean pockets — there’s another product you should consider. The $449 Analogue Nt Mini just might be the finest Nintendo Entertainment System ever.

Perhaps you’ve heard tell of the original Analogue Nt: a gorgeous game console carved out of a single block of aluminum. A game console compatible with every single NES and Famicom cartridge, controller and accessory collectors have stockpiled over the years.

A game console that used the exact same Ricoh 20A3 and 2C02 silicon chips as the original NES, harvested from actual Famicom motherboards, to ensure picture perfection.

Close

Analogue NT is 8-bit NES perfection
Drag

Analogue couldn’t make enough of the $499 Analogue Nt, shown in the video above, to satisfy rabid demand. There simply weren’t enough chips.

So its engineers spent 5,000 hours re-engineering the NES’ circuits to fit in a modern Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). They shrunk down down the aluminum alloy case to make the system 20 percent smaller, and added a 1080p HDMI output to play nice with modern TVs. (The original needed a $79 upgrade board to do that.)

The new Analogue Nt Mini even has a bundled wireless NES gamepad with an estimated 20 hours of battery life, so you can play from your couch. Wouldn’t want to get too close to that TV screen! Not to mention 16-bit, 48kHz digital and analog audio, plus component, composite and S-Video outputs for practically any type of TV.

“I can’t overstate how sophisticated our hardware is now,” says Analogue founder Christopher Taber. We can’t wait to test that claim.

A closer look at the Analogue Nt Mini
See full gallery

1 – 4 of 6

Next
Prev

Preorders should now be open at Analogue’s website, though we hesitate to say when the new device might ship. The original Analogue Nt was delayed several times, and eventually arrived a year behind schedule.