Analogue Pocket gains cartridge support for OpenFPGA Game Boy cores

Analogue Pocket owners gained a meaningful upgrade: OpenFPGA Game Boy cores could run physical cartridges, starting with budude2’s Game Boy DMG core. Ericlewis showed the change in a tutorial titled OpenFPGA Cores Now Run Cartridges | Game Boy DMG First on Analogue Pocket, and the result moved the Pocket closer to the feel of original hardware instead of a pure ROM-loading machine.

The setup was built to be simple. budude2’s openfpga-GBC instructions said to copy the Assets, Cores, and Platform folders to the root of the Pocket’s SD card, then place the Game Boy BIOS in /Assets/gb/common as gb_bios.bin and the Game Boy Color BIOS in /Assets/gbc/common as gbc_bios.bin. That matters because the feature was not aimed at tinkering for its own sake. It gave cartridge collectors, FPGA fans, and anyone who wanted the Pocket to behave more like a real Game Boy a direct path to using original media.

The update also moved beyond a one-off hack. A June 9, 2025 GitHub release for budude2/openfpga-GBC version 1.4.0 said it pulled in issue #85, which added support for external cartridges and credited Ericlewis. That upstreamed the feature into the core project, giving it a more durable place in the OpenFPGA ecosystem rather than leaving it as a separate workaround.

Analogue’s own documentation helps explain why the change lands so well on the Pocket. The company said the Primary Core FPGA is fully available to developers, while a smaller System FPGA is reserved for Analogue OS. In other words, OpenFPGA cores are running on the Pocket’s main hardware path, which is exactly why cartridge support feels like a hardware feature, not a software trick.

That also pairs with the platform’s display options. Analogue’s openFPGA 2.0 changelog said all Pocket display modes can be used by OpenFPGA cores, including a CRT Trinitron mode under certain conditions. Put together, cartridge support and display flexibility give Pocket owners a stronger authenticity story: original carts, FPGA cores, and screen behavior that can be tuned to match the experience they actually want. With Pocket firmware listed at v2.5 on March 18, 2025, the platform already had the software footing needed for that shift.