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The Analogue 3D, an upcoming game console that can play Nintendo 64 cartridges at 4K, is set to release in the first quarter of 2025 for $250, Analogue said in a press release on Wednesday. Preorders go live on Oct. 21, at 8 a.m. PT.
The Analogue 3D, like the well-reviewed Analogue Pocket handheld, uses a field-programmable gate array, or FPGA, chip that can emulate hardware down to the transistor level. So, unlike software emulation, Analogue’s approach achieves 100% game compatibility.
Given that modern hardware is significantly more powerful than what Nintendo was able to churn out in 1996, the Analogue 3D can run games at a 4K resolution, which is 10 times the resolution of most of the N64 catalogue. The Analogue 3D supports Bluetooth LE, Wi-Fi and has four controller ports for multiplayer fun. It’s also compatible with modern controllers, like the 8BitDo 64 controller.
Analogue says that because of the way the N64 rendered graphics, many games from that era tend to look best on an old-school CRT television. This is because CRTs had an analogue signal output and created an image using scanlines instead of fixed pixel grids. Because images were rendered on a CRT line-by-line, it smoothed out pixels, creating a softer look to the square pixels output by an N64. Since modern displays can show every pixel with greater sharpness and clarity, old-school systems that run at lower resolutions tend to look blocky as a result.
To remedy this, Analogue is essentially creating filters that mimic that original CRT look. Analogue says the “Original Display Modes are meticulously reproduced” and “virtually indistinguishable recreations of CRT displays to capture the warmth, depth and texture in every frame” while also emulating the “soft glow of phosphor.”
Analogue 3D surrounded by various controllers.
Analogue is an American gaming hardware company that specializes in bringing retro consoles into the modern age. It began to gain wide recognition with the release of the Analogue NT, a system designed to play Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Famicon cartridges on a modern HD television through HDMI. It was 2021’s $220 Analogue Pocket, however, that gave the company mainstream appeal.
The Pocket is a gaming handheld that can play Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Sega Game Gear, Atari Lynx, TurboGrafx-16, Neo Geo Pocket and Pocket Color cartridges on a modern LCD display at a sharp 1,600×1,440-pixel resolution. Like a Nintendo Switch, there’s also a docking station that could output those games onto a television via HDMI. The Analogue Pocket consistently sells out and its limited edition colorways can sometimes end up on eBay for wildly inflated prices. Some fans online have criticized the company for its strategy of doing limited edition drops as a way to gain repeat purchases.
The Analogue 3D is the only third-party N64 console on the market that works with actual game cartridges. Analogue says that creating the 3D was particularly challenging because of how N64 games were developed at the time. The company says that 100% compatibility hasn’t ever been achieved on any sort of emulation until now. Even rereleases of N64 games on the Switch by Nintendo itself ran into graphical bugs and other issues.
While the Nintendo 64 did include a controller packed in with the box, the Analogue 3D won’t. Fans will either need to grab their original N64 controllers from the basement or buy the 8BitDo 64, available for $40.
