The ‘90s rivalry between the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis was fierce, dividing playgrounds across the country. But three decades later, if you’ve managed to get your hands on an Analogue Pocket, you don’t have to take a side, as the handheld now plays both SNES and Genesis games with some easy updates.
There was never any debate over whether or not the Analogue Pocket would be able to play games besides the handheld consoles supported natively through its cartridge slot and adapters (including the Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Sega Game Gear, and more). The Analogue Pocket was engineered from the start with an additional FPGA allowing developers to transform the handheld into many other consoles, including machines from the 16-bit era. Just last week, we reported that the Analogue Pocket was finally able to play Super Nintendo games, but now it’s the Sega Mega Drive’s turn.
On their Retro Game Corps YouTube channel, Russ Crandall recently demonstrated the Analogue Pocket playing Genesis games including Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Mutant League Football, and just like with the SNES, they’ve provided links and easy-to-follow instructions on the Retro Game Corps website on how to add the unofficial Sega Genesis/Mega Drive MiSTer core (the open source project that uses FPGAs to accurately replicate retro console gameplay), developed by Eric Lewis, to the Pocket. If you can unzip files and copy them to a microSD card, you have all the technical skills required to pull this off.
Unlike the Pocket’s SNES MiSTer core, the Mega Drive core is still in an early Alpha stage at this point, which means that in addition to random bugs, there are lots of games that simply won’t play on the Analogue Pocket yet, and save states don’t work. You’ll want to occasionally check back on Lewis’ GitHub page for updates on the Genesis core, which will slowly but surely improve support for the Pocket.
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