Analogue 3D's new update lets you color-code your digital cartridges

Analogue has released firmware update 1.2.6 for the Analogue 3D, adding the ability to customize cartridge colors in the system's digital library alongside several display fixes. The update dropped on April 24 and is available now for the FPGA-based retro console.

A rainbow of plastic

By default, the operating system now assigns the correct original shell color to your games based on their release history. You can also manually swap them between gray, red, green, blue, yellow, gold, black, purple, and pink.

It means my digital shelf can finally reflect the yellow of Donkey Kong 64, the black of Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, and the blue of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Brightly colored plastic cartridges were a common sight, with games like Activision's Spider-Man and Ubi Soft's Rocket: Robot on Wheels sporting bright red shells. It even covers the gold of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and the rainbow of Japanese imports sitting on my shelf. Nintendo's Japanese releases often had unique shell colors that never made it overseas. Now I can set those colors manually in the OS to match the physical imports.

Fixing the flicker

Beyond the aesthetics, the patch tackles some display bugs. The beta Progressive Output mode has been updated to fix blinking and flickering screens in certain titles, including Resident Evil 2.

Capcom's survival horror classic, released for the N64 in 1999, pushes the original N64 hardware pretty hard with its compressed full-motion video and pre-rendered backgrounds. It makes sense that it needed some targeted FPGA tweaks to output cleanly on modern screens. The Analogue 3D outputs at 4K resolution, which is a massive leap from the 240p and 480i signals the original Nintendo 64 pushed to CRT televisions back in the day. Because the FPGA chip is recreating the hardware at a circuit level, it has to handle all the weird rendering quirks developers used in the late nineties.

Small quality of life tweaks

You can now toggle that Progressive Output mode directly from the in-game menu rather than having to back out to the main settings. Being able to toggle it on the fly without leaving the game is a huge time saver when you are testing which display mode works best for a specific title.

Long game titles will finally scroll in the library menu. This is a small change, but it makes browsing much easier when you have a bunch of sports games with identical prefixes taking up screen space. The update also improves general SD card stability and adjusts the auto-overclock behavior. Analogue included an updated list of 3D OS hotkeys and tweaked the average and maximum luminance settings for Advanced HDR.

The Analogue 3D launched late last year as a hardware-level recreation of the Nintendo 64. Unlike software emulators, it uses a Field-Programmable Gate Array chip to mimic the original silicon, aiming for total compatibility with the original cartridges. It is good to see Analogue continuing to iron out the edge cases, especially for games like Resident Evil 2 that have seen a resurgence lately thanks to recent PC ports on GOG and Steam.

Resident Evil 2 (GOG) has previously been available on Humble Bundle for $4.99 (50% off).

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