Polymega Slips Into Early 2020, But It's Bringing Some Cool Stuff With It

Intelligent patches! New screen filters! Impressive compatibility!

Polymega's been in the oven for quite some time now, and, like so many new hardware projects, has been subject to a few growing pains. This ambitious system is aiming to be the ultimate retro box, allowing you to not only use your original games and controllers but also download your games to internal storage to create an all-in-one solution for your vintage gaming needs. A series of replaceable modules offer support for a wide range of platforms, and there's even going to be an online store which will allow you to legally purchase retro titles direct from the rights holder.

Getting such a major project off the ground was never going to be easy; sure enough, the Polymega project took some flak early on for omitting FPGA and confidently claiming that it had the notoriously difficult Sega Saturn emulation nailed down – some of that criticism was answered, but there was always the question about if the system would hit its proposed 2019 launch date.

That big question has now been answered as the team behind Polymega has revealed that, while pilot production has commenced, the system won't be arriving until early next year. "The timeline for shipping is ASAP," says an update on the official Polymega site. "But realistically, we expect to have your console en route in the next 90 days (end of February)."

While that's not ideal news, it's hardly surprising as the company has been pretty quiet for much of the latter part of 2019. However, on the positive side, a list of compatible games has been issued which makes for pretty encouraging reading; the system is said to be "over 90% compatible" with each system's official release libraries and testing has been going on all year to document compatibility with Polymega's BIOS replacements.

The other big news involves the system's Virtual Display screen filters, which can be tinkered with quite dramatically and can be saved either globally or on a game-by-game basis. Then we have what the team at Polymega is calling "Intelligent Game Patching", which allows you to apply patches to titles and treat them as separate games, essentially running multiple versions of the same title. Oh, and a small analogue stick has been added to the RGC01 Lightgun, which will allow you to navigate the console's UI when using the controller, amongst other things.

While some of Polymega's more passionate critics have labelled the system 'vapourware', it would seem that this dream system is indeed going to make it into the hands of consumers, even if it's a little later than we'd like. Suffice to say, we'll be going hands-on with it the moment our unit arrives. Did you place a pre-order? Let us know with a comment below.

[via polymega.com]