Just to clarify, Jobst is talking about the sealed, high end gaming market. The used copy of Mario Party 3 you are waiting to buy is still $60. The open prices are the ones I care about, because they affect me the most (and I would wager, 99.9% of collectors).

What do you mean by instruction set? As far as I remember, Analogue physically looks at the chips under microscopes and recreates that physical design via FPGA (This is because the patents have expired, which is different from copywrite). You could be talking about bios (which I know of the Pocket, for example, they used their own, which included skipping the “Gameboy” animation when you first power on.), Analogue can just write their own BIOS that gets around it. (BIOS would be software, and thus classified under copywrite, instead of patent.)

Analogue is doing everything safe though. The products are marketed and intended for you to play your physical cartridges on new hardware. Nintendo isn’t even going after emulators, which despite the hoops we try to jump through, are really primarily used for piracy. That is because the emulation developers are avoiding any copywritten work. Even then, the only ROM sites that Nintendo has really gone after are the ones selling the games.

Short of a new law or precedent being set, Analogue is in the clear here.

This device is FPGA, and not emulation. The chip recreates itself to act exactly as the N64’s chips would run. The benefits are that you get less input lag, more accurate gameplay, and you can use your original cartridges/controllers in a plug and play set up.

This doesn’t replace emulation, but if you are serious about playing older console games, Analogue’s FPGA products are a great premium solution.