A few weeks ago, the rechargeable power core came back in stock for the Chromatic. On the face of it, that the Chromatic even has a separate, rechargeable power core is a bit odd in the modern gaming marketplace. How long has it been standard for gaming devices to just have built in batteries? 23 years? It’s easy to specifically date this, incidentally, because that’s when the Game Boy Advance SP came out, was in 2003. With that, fumbling with AA batteries became consigned to the dustbin of history.
So why does the Chromatic still use AA batteries? It’s not a technological issue. The FPGA’s main successor for Game Boy Color cartridge play, the Analogue Pocket, uses a built-in rechargeable battery just like nearly any other modern portable electronic device. Rather, I suspect the issue is a philosophical one. The Chromatic hearkens back to a late 1990s aesthetic, back when we owned games, instead of purchasing a license to play them.
But we also owned the devices we used to play them on. A rechargeable battery, while nice, had hidden hazards. Locked away in a device behind casing the consumer isn’t supposed to access, such batteries can go bad and even explode. This is a trivial problem for older model Game Boys, with forgotten AA batteries that might leak at worst and are easily removed. Other devices, however, be they SPs or PSPs or Wii U controllers are safety hazards. I would recommend checking for bulging batteries in such devices if you haven’t looked at them lately, incidentally.
The Chromatic power core, by contrast, is a choice. The Chromatic itself is still perfectly usable without it, and indeed, gets such great battery life off of AAs that had batteries thirty years ago been this efficient, a rechargeable battery might not have seemed like such a necessity for our portable gaming devices. It certainly doesn’t help that in addition to a rechargeable battery, the SP had a backlight, an innovation that much more unambiguously improved the gaming experience without needing to consider long-term philosophical questions like whether we as consumers should have the right to modify our own batteries. Or perhaps, more relevantly, whether a cheaper product is worth having to take on that right which sounds in practice more like a responsibility.
I won’t pretend to be able to resolve that question for us today. But I do think it’s worth noting that even buying the power core separately, the Chromatic is still cheaper than the Analogue Pocket, and comes with an exceptional version of Tetris to boot. It’s also still in stock, and comes in a much funner variety of colors. Still can’t play Game Boy Advance games though, or play rom files, which I should note, is not sanctioned by Analogue itself. All of which is to say, these are philosophical differences, and which ones you think are more important, are just as motivates by your own gaming philosophy as it is the ambiguous technical trade-offs.
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