gaming

It’s been exactly one year since the initial announcement of the Analogue 3D, an HD-upscaled, FPGA-powered Nintendo 64 in the tradition of Analogue’s long-running line of high-end retro machines. Today, Analogue is revealing more details about the hardware, which will sell for $250 and plans to ship in the first quarter of 2025 (a slight delay from the previously announced 2024 release plan).

Like previous Analogue devices, the Analogue 3D uses a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to simulate the actual logic gates found in original N64 hardware. That helps ensure 100 percent compatibility with the entire N64 cartridge library across all regions, Analogue promises, and should avoid the long-standing accuracy and lag issues inherent to most software-based emulation of the N64.

To get that level of fidelity, the Analogue team spent four years programming an Altera Cyclone FPGA with a full 220,000 logic elements. That’s a big step up from previous Analogue devices—the Analogue Pocket’s main FPGA board featured just 49,000 logic elements three years ago. But the Analogue Pocket also included a second, 15,000-logic-element FPGA, which allowed it to run an expanding list of openFPGA cores to support games from other classic consoles.

Analogue has abandoned that additional FPGA for the Analogue 3D, meaning those openFPGA cores will not be usable on the new hardware. “If we wanted to offer Analogue 3D with openFPGA (which is not the purpose or focus of the product), it would require not only a second FPGA but an even more powerful base FPGA, therefore increasing the price to a price that doesn’t suit our goals,” Analogue founder Christopher Taber told Ars last year.

When faced with a legal threat from Nintendo, most alleged modders, ROM pirates, and/or emulator makers will simply give in to a cease-and-desist demand, reach an out of court settlement, or plead guilty rather than hiring legal representation for what could be a lengthy, costly trial. Then there’s Ryan Daly, alleged owner of ModdedHardware.com, who has apparently decided to represent himself as a recent lawsuit brought against him by the Switch maker moves forward.

Nintendo says it first approached Daly in March about his site (currently password-protected but archived here) and its sales of modded Switch consoles, console modding services, and piracy-enabling devices such as the MIG Switch card that were pre-installed with popular Nintendo games. At that time, Daly agreed “both verbally and in signed writing” to refrain from these infringing sales, according to Nintendo. It was only after months of Daly continuing those sales and largely ignoring further contact from Nintendo that the company says it was forced to file its June lawsuit in a Seattle federal court.

In that initial lawsuit, Nintendo said it “received a communication from a lawyer purporting to represent [Daly]” in June, followed by a message days later that Daly “was in the process of obtaining new counsel.” That search for new counsel has seemingly not moved forward, as last week Daly filed a pro se response to Nintendo’s allegations, representing himself without any outside legal advice (thanks, TorrentFreak).

Your first Halls of Torment run starts with a basic warrior, but new classes quickly unlock, each with their own distinct weapons and gameplay rhythms. My favorite ended up being the exterminator class, which uses a flamethrower to simply turn everything around him into a wall of flame. If that’s not your speed, you can choose from defensive shieldbearers with extremely slow attacks, melee axe-wielders that swing quickly with wild abandon, ranged archers that can deal damage from afar, magic-users that make heavy use of area-of-effect spells, a class with a semi-autonomous dog that goes after nearby enemies, and more.

Diablo, but also not Diablo

Just from glancing at Halls of Torment screenshots, it’s easy to glean the heavy visual influence the game owes to the grainy, isometric sprites of old-school Diablo. That throwback, nostalgic appeal extends to little touches like the menu system and low-fi voiceovers for NPCs as well, which comes across as a deliberate if cheesy design choice.

The game’s old-school sprites also make it easier for your graphics card to handle literally hundreds of moving objects and flashy attack effects on screen at once, too. Despite this, my relatively high-end system started struggling to maintain a consistent frame rate by the end of the more difficult dungeons.

The visual frenzy of all these old-school sprites can get a bit overwhelming, especially when some of your own summon attacks end up difficult to distinguish at a glance from enemy threats. Overall, though, the use of distinct colors makes it easy enough to quickly evaluate a screen full of information and extrapolate what it will look like over the coming seconds. I especially appreciated the big, purple lines and circles that telegraph where projectile attacks are going to appear just moments before they do.