Everdrives (& other flashcarts too!)

i have every one of those except the turbo one (so far!), and man are these perfect for retro gaming - betas, prototypes & so much more, all while avoiding the awful retro bubble!

ive played more fan translations, hacks & otherwise unavailable stuff (some N64 DD ports!) since discovering these years ago & moving away from repro carts. all while not worrying about failing battery backup, damaging hardware or any of that!

one day i’ll sell a kidney and get the neo geo one. meantime though, what do you guys think of em?

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I have one for just about every system I can get them for, except I’m still on an EZFlash IV for GBA.

Really is nice to be able to play Ocarina of Time: Master Quest on a real N64 with proper button prompts, with a bunch other nitpicks fixed as well.

Krikzz is the most important person in retro gaming. Without him we’d all be slumming it on emulators.

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I’m still waiting for my Mega EverDrive X5… Even though the guys at Krikzz store told me it’s all right with my order, I feel it’s taking ages to arrive here.

You have the same labels as Joe from GameSack!

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I’m still waiting on an updated Master Everdrive because of the improper ram voltage thing. He hinted at updated Master Everdrives coming but so far nothing.

haha i should take pics of mine, but that’s totally their ones i used for the pic, you’re right!

ah, didn’t know they were gonna update that one…been using mine for a while & love it, i’m not too worried about the voltage thing myself

I only have one flashcart so far - the Flashboy Plus for Virtual Boy. I’m not even sure if they’re made anymore but it’s worth it to play prototypes in real hardware (Bound High in particular).

Courtesy of Socksfelloff and BTails, I have two more flash carts on the way second hand for SNES and GBA respectively (thanks again guys. You are the best). I look forward to finally playing Terranigma (in 60hz), Seiken Densetu 3 and Mother 3 in English on real hardware.

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I have the SD2SNES and all Everdrives except the Master Everdrive and some of the newest versions which are the same thing as the ones I got a couple of years ago. Only one I’d want to update is the new Gameboy cart as it’s an actual improvement over the old one.

Usage highlights for me include:

Playing Mega Turrican which is otherwise very expensive to obtain.

Hyper Metroid, a tough but excellent Super Metroid romhack.

Metroid Rogue Dawn on the Everdrive N8 – romhack built on top of Metroid but a completely new game and quite good too.

Zelda ALttP DX (QOL enhancements) with fantastic MSU1 music. A glimpse at what the SNES Playstation could have been.

All things PC Engine. I have a nice little collection of Hucards (and CDs) but shit gets pricey fast when you get to the really good stuff. I wanna buy legit and hope a lot of these make their way to Switch VC.

Reading olddd newsletters (from SNES rom dump groups?). There are a bunch in one of the folders Smoke Monster set up for the SD2SNES.

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good points, i ran through LTTP with MSU1 sound recently & loved it…did DX add much else?

also, ive found some MSU1 files are hard to find these days, ive been trying to gather as many as i can just in case those wells dry up!

I have one for the pc engine. Bought it purely to listen to just the sound files especially on games that don’t have the audio track option but sadly on the newer model which I have some of the ones I desperately wanted to listen to and record into MP3s the older sound files were coded incorrectly and play at wrong speeds on the newer flash cart…

I hope someone can rip and code these HES files correctly especially on the Konami pc engine games at the not too distant future.

Seeing home-brew stuff like the gif below running on real hardware was an eye opener. Wondered why they didn’t even try it back in the day when the system was alive and selling.

I own the PCE/TG16 Everdrive and a V64 Jr. I love running homebrew and translations on the PCE/TG16 via the Everdrive.

I have an SD2SNES and Everdrive N8 that I bought on Black Friday two years ago.

I still need to try out the MSU-1 soundtracks for games. I also want to play some of the Zelda randomizers. I guess I should actually play LTTP first though, lol I’ve never played it.

I really like the N8 as I’ve played through some rom hacks (the Ghosts N Goblins one from the playthrough last October here was great). I want to the play the Metroid Rogue Dawn game as well.

I was thinking of maybe grabbing one for my DS Lite (for DS and GBA). I actually bought a Supercard DSTwo plus online last week but I guess it was discontinued. There are a seemingly endless amounts of R4 card variations so maybe I’ll look into that in the future.

Edit: meant to reply to @IrishNinja

Don’t go crazy trying to track down MSU1 tracks for every available game that uses the feature. Some are awful, a downgrade from the original music (Turtles in Time) or just don’t sync well with the gameplay (Super Metroid). Have a listen on Youtube to see what I mean. I actually think ALttP is as good as it gets.

Here are the DX improvements:

Improvements

  • All new, CD-quality soundtrack (MSU-1, higan/bsnes or SD2SNES only, requires separate download of soundtrack files)
  • Improved Pegasus boots, turn while running
  • Break pots with sword
  • Collect items with sword
  • Cancel flute transport
  • Death counter no longer increments when selecting “Save and Quit”
  • Use L/R to quickly switch between items
  • Slowdown reduced (FastROM)

Bugfixes

  • Kholdstare shell fade re-enabled
  • Mothula invincibility to L4 sword fixed
  • Glove palette when switching to map fixed
  • Shield palette when retrieved from pikit killed with ether fixed
  • Various flickering issues fixed
  • Cane of Somaria glitches fixed
  • Magic cape statue pulling glitch fixed

I played through this one and I liked it. There’s also another one, ALttP Redux. It’s based off DX and has more extensive changes. I think it’s worth checking out and I’ll probably give that one a go for my next ALttP playthrough. Romhacking.net - Hacks - A Link to the Past Redux

A Link to the Past DX hack that further modifies the game to include changes to accommodate the game into the overall franchise, as well as renaming stuff badly translated and making changes for characters with official artwork not matching with the sprites/palettes in-game.

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I took the time to listen through these and thought all of them sound terrible.

I actually bought an SD2SNES earlier from retrotowers…it’ll be here tomorrow. I had a long hard look at the available MSU-1 hacks and came to the conclusion that most of them are terrible, put together with no real cohesion at all.

ah well

I’m listening now. Jarring transitions, awfully out of place tracks that don’t fit the gameplay, audio clipping, music drowning out sound effects, audio levels all over the place… it’s what I expected. There’s an amateur’s, non-musician’s touch to all of this. My enthusiasm for this stuff dropped when I realized most of the orchestrated music out there doesn’t work in games. Frankly I’d rather see more midi tunes and synth tracks which would probably be a better fit for 90s era games than a bunch of live instruments.

Overall I think MSU1 has had the opposite intended effect and made me appreciate what we did get, how much thought was put into the original composition and the skillful work of the video game composers who had to do their best with very limited resources.

yeah, i dug LTTP (i did play DX one i think!), Road Blasters & having vocals in Rock N Roll Racing was neat, not much else. i think Dracula X with the turro CD OST would’ve been an improvement but it’s still not a areat game, haha

I’m a guitar guy so I really liked the Mega Man and TMNT MSU-1 tracks. They don’t replace the originals but are still fun to visit.