Everdrive

[Harrison]

I finally got hold of:

Super Everdrive - Nintendo SNES
Everdrive 64 - Nintendo 64

The developers site is at http://krikzz.com/

He makes them himself and they are great quality and work really well. We just had a group buy over at Amibay to reduce the cost per unit direct from the developer. It was a great success and the organiser of the group buy is thinking of doing another on this September if any of you are interested.

If you don't know what the Everdrive devices are, they are PCBs that fit standard cartridge shells for each console they are designed for, and they have an SD card slot on the top. You plug them into your console like a normal game cartridge. You copy the game roms onto an SD card and slot it into the Everdrive. Then you just switch the console on, the Everdrive boots up and its menu appears, allowing you to navigate the SD card, pick a game, load it into the Everdrives flash memory, and then the game boots.

Really fast loading and both the SNES and N64 Everdrives I have work really nicely.

The Everdrive's have some nice features.

The SNES one allows game saving to the Everdrive, and you can then copy the game saves from the cards memory into a save game file on the SD card. It has has a customised CIC code allowing multiregion gaming. A DSP chip from a real game card can also be added at a later date to the PCB to offer support for games that use one. There are about 15 games that need one to run, so I'm not bothered about that as I own the originals of most of the good ones.

The N64 one needs a real CIC chip fitted (which the maker can do when you buy). You need the right chip for US and PAL regions, then the card works perfectly with your region's N64. It runs any region game perfectly, as does the SNES version. I've quickly tried some US and JAP games, as well as PAL, and all worked so far. I've read some games don't work but I think it is only a few. It can also load NES games via an emulator. I've not tried this yet, but take a look on the video on the site, as it shows it in action.

I will write more about these later.

The developer is also working on a new version for the Megadrive. The existing MD Everdrive works well, but the new one is even better. I've never owned a real Megadrive (just emulated), so when we have the next group buy it is tempting to get one.

A very in depth look at the N64 version can be found at http://gbatemp.net/topic/316539-everdrive-64-review/

And for game saving, the N64 version looks like it can save all types of game saves to the SD card, other than controller pak game saves, but then you just use a real game save pak as normal. Very nice.