The Sega CD runs on the Analogue Pocket for the first time

A developer known as obrien654j has shown off a demo of an FPGA core for the Sega CD (Mega-CD in Europe) running on the Analogue Pocket, Analogue's openFPGA handheld. A Sega CD core already exists for MiSTer FPGA, but it was long assumed that porting it to the Pocket's more constrained hardware wouldn't be possible.

According to early reports shared on Reddit, the core already has "good audio timing", though the developer says they're "still working through some boot reliability issues, and FMVs stutter here and there". The work builds on the foundations laid by the open-source openfpga-megacd project.

A symbolic milestone for the FPGA scene

The Sega CD remains a complex platform to faithfully reimplement, between its CD drive, its additional ASIC chip, and its particular memory handling. While this demo is still just a proof of concept, it revives hopes for a public release of the core, teased as coming "soon" by its author, which would finally let players run titles like Sonic CD or Lunar: The Silver Star natively on Analogue's handheld.

Source: Time Extension