to preface: since switching over to everdrives on the cart based systems years ago, its admittedly rare that i get up to switch out carts from the shelf when i play…no doubt some of this came from the inevitable heart break of seeing childhood save games disappear to dying batteries.
the other common complaint i’ve seen about flashcarts is the idea that having entire libraries at your hand causes some to lose focus, and i get that! i recommend writing your backlog on a marker board with COFFEE IS FOR CLOSERS or something similar, it sometimes works for me
still, optical drives have given me such shit over the years - i’ve gone though numerous PlayStation 1&2s, my duo-r drops music when it likes, my local repair shop gave up on OG Xbox and is like “just softmod it, man”…oh and my dreamcast pots need adjusting
so i was pretty excited when this satiator showed up, and it does exactly what i want! i don’t even gotta burn a disc when new fan translations drop, and the saturn scene has been lovely for those in recent times. its so cool, and got me thinking about others:
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PSIO - so my chipped PSX lacks a serial port, and i know it needs a single wire installed, but i don’t see anything else on the horizon at the moment, and this is one of my favorite libraries to dive into - theres a metric fuckton of crazy weird japanese games i wanna try out
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HDD loader - i’ve had this with a dying hard drive on PS2 forever, debating a new drive and resetting it…the load time decrease on some compatible titles alone makes it cool for me (unsure what other options the scene has?)
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DC Mode - i need to research this one, i know the install isn’t hard but losing disc use means i’d almost rather have it on a backup dreamcast. also not sure how compatibility is at the moment so please post here if you use it!
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i know there’s a Turbo option that doesn’t work on said duo-r, but with the last model genesis everdrive offering sega-cd playback sans hardware, i can’t help but wonder if a similar device could work for pc-engine, or is that not really feasible?
i’m sure the scene will get around to gamecube one day, but i’ve personally had little problems with those. anyway what do y’all think?