pocket-sync

pocket-sync

“And fan-created apps let you load up a microSD card quickly and effortlessly.”

wired.com - Review: Analogue Pocket

A Windows / Mac / Linux GUI to do stuff with the Analogue Pocket.

Built using Tauri

Features:

• Browse, configure, & install cores
• Export corrected & upscalled screenshots
• Backup & restore save files
• Quick links to open game file folders
• Browse & manage (bulk delete) save states
• Export GB Camera photos
• Automatically copy files over to the Pocket

Installation

• Download the installer for your platform from The Latest Release
• Note you’ll need to click through to allow the application on Windows & right click to allow the application on MacOS since I can’t be bothered setting up (& paying yearly for) the signing process
• The SD card will need to have been initialised by the Pocket to get recognised
• Plug in your Pocket / put in the SD card, click “Connect to Pocket”, select the root folder (the one with Assets & Cores & Saves etc in it) and go
• It’ll create a pocket_sync.json file on to your pocket to hold config on first run

Windows Defender (& other AntiVirus) warnings

If this starts happening again let me know & I’ll resubmit the app to the Windows Defender team to have them change the virus definitions since it’s a false positive.

macOS ‘Apple could not verify “Pocket Sync”’ warning

Starting with v5.3.0 the app should be notarised with Apple, meaning that they’ve checked it for malware etc & now there should just be a single dismissable warning about downloading an app from the internet.

So long as the Github sponsors stay above the cost of an Apple Dev Membership I’ll keep the app notarised.

If there are issues though see this guide.

AI Contributions

LLM driven contributions are welcomed if, and only if, they:

• are bug fixes targeting a single or small number of bugs, with reproduction steps given in the PR
• they target a single feature, in a way which doesn’t make more sense as a plugin
• they don’t introduce a new mode which increases the number of variations to test e.g. a CLI mode requiring every feature to be done twice, a “minimal” mode requiring all new UI to be checked twice, etc

Large AI driven PRs which touch hundreds of files and / or lines of code will not be reviewed, though discussion on large scale changes is welcomed via the issues.

Roadmap

Translations

The app now supports translations into the user’s language & locale for most things in the UI.

You can now use fink.inlang.com to edit / create translations & submit them as PRs

If you’re fluent in another language and feel like helping out you can find the files in https://github.com/neil-morrison44/pocket-sync/tree/main/src/i18n/locales , just add one for the language (e.g. en) then make tweaks on top of it for locale specific things (e.g. en-US).

So far I’ve got translations for:

• Chinese (@fevaoctwh)
• Spanish (@rayelward)
• German (@auer1329 & @sir-codealot)
• French (@f00b4r0)
• Portuguese (@reinaldosimoes)
• Japanese (@bigmoonur)
• Vietnamese (@anh-tuan)
• Bulgarian (@toto99303)
• Turkish (@sujade)

Which I’ve been keeping up to date as I add new features (hopefully well enough). It’s in the ICU message format, which there are some guides available online for, but the main trick is that the brackets create levels of stuff to change vs leave e.g. "Change me {leave me {change me}}" so a “language” which is just english but shouting might have:

{
  "item": {
    "game_count": "THERE ARE {count, plural, =0 {NO GAMES} one {ONE GAME} other {# GAMES}}"
  }
}

Done

• Hopefully get the saves backups working how I’d planned (close enough)
• Support for adding custom images from PNGs, editing platform data, etc
• Improve Search
• Save State management (search, bulk delete etc)
• Input viewer
• Core settings
• Screenshot bulk delete / save
• Autobackup saves on connection (if there’s changes)
• Input viewer supporting game specific inputs
• Settings supporting game specific settings
• Image packs
• Manual MiSTer save file sync
• Installing / Checking for firmware updates (might wait for the real release of 1.1 for this)
• Newsfeed support
• Support for i18n translations
• List new cores / updates since the last Pocket was connected (covered by the inventory’s newsfeed)
• Export Game Boy Camera images from the save state
• “Update All” feature to update multiple installed cores at once
• GB Palette editor / catalogue
• Switched to Tauri v2
• Auto-Repair button for some common issues causing errors
• New icons by @AbFarid

Soon

Longer term

• Library viewing / editing if that’s ever rolled out to OpenFPGA

FAQs

Anything about files from the archive

I have no involvement in managing the files on the archive, try the FPGA Gaming discord.

Why doesn’t this work on older MacOS version?

The tool I use to make this tauri only supports back to 10.13, so anything before then probably won’t even open – also Apple don’t keep the default browser in old OSes up to date (Windows does for a while via service packs & in Linux you can do what you want) so I can only really support / can test on the last 2 major versions, sorry.

Why’s the linux version using some EOL runtimes (webkitgtk issues)?

This particularly affects the Flatpak version I believe. The short, and vauge, version is due to Tauri v1 only supporting a particular version of webkitgtk.

I’m planning on updating to Tauri v2 soon after release, assuming I have the time around whenever it comes. Hopefully nothing fully breaks before then.

Can read more here https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/discussions/4426#discussioncomment-6341398

Why isn’t some core in the list?

If it’s new it could just be that it’s not yet added to https://github.com/openfpga-library/analogue-pocket. If it’s been released outwith Github then support for whatever the format is will need to be added to the inventory.

You can install cores by dragging & dropping the .zip onto any running Pocket Sync window and it’ll install as if you’ve downloaded it.

OpenFPGA Validator

I’ve put together this https://github.com/neil-morrison44/openfpga-validator which can be run by core devs by doing npx openfpga-validator@latest check <path_to_zip>.

It should catch places where any files in the core differ from what’s specified on https://www.analogue.co/developer/docs/overview as well as make some warnings / recommendations for things which aren’t specified in the Analogue docs but will trip up updaters.

Donations?

If you want to sponsor to help out with on going maintenance / future features / bug fixing then there should be a github sponsorship thing to the right somewhere. There’s no extra features from being a sponsor, and I don’t have plans of adding any.

You should donate to the folks actually porting / building cores first tough, since that’s where the fun stuff comes from.

Thanks to

• The OpenFPGA Library supplies a bunch of the data used in the app
• This recreation of the Analogue OS font
• And this refinement of the recreation of the Analogue OS font