Hi there. I want to buy an Everdrive flash cart. I've seen it for a price I consider OK at www.emere.es ( And it has a Sonic 2 HD logo in the sticker :specialed but now... I don't know if I should buy just megadrive Everdrive or the better, Mega Everdrive ( who it a lot more expensive). Does it worth the higher price? What are the differences between them? I heard the regular everdrive cant save games for 32x games, but other people told me that it does... what does it really do? If you have the carts, your advice would be great.
I have the Mega Everdrive cart, it's without a doubt the best flash cart for Megadrive. The main differences between it and the regular Everdrive is support for save states, and the fact it loads games directly off the SDCard into RAM instead of writing it to internal flash memory. Therefore, load times are much faster as well as avoiding the eventual write exhaustion you get with flash memory.
The Everdrive MD and the Mega Everdrive are both made by Krikzz, who has feature lists on his own site for both: Mega Everdrive Everdrive MD The thing about the Mega Everdrive not properly mentioned their is that it has an FPGA; which is a nifty type of chip that has emulation capabilities, the power of the one in the Mega Everdrive has led to some people over on assembler games (I don't know if its possible or been achieved yet) that it may be possible to emulate GB or NES games on it, as well as it's current support for Master System games.
The flash exhaustion is the only thing that's putting me off. Averagely, how many writes-to-flash can the Everdrive-MD cope with? I'm also considering getting one of these, but the newest one is a lot more expensive. Seeming as I already have all the Sonic games on MD, I'll probably only use this cart for my hacks and testing anyone else's hack (and maybe a few other selection of games like Micro Machines, SOR, etc). Save-states I'm not interested in, that I can use an emulator for. Loading the game, I can cope with a few seconds wait (and if I understand right, when you turn it off and on, the game is still in the flash memory, meaning I don't have to wait for it to load again?). So, depending on how many writes it can cope with will be my selection. Any idea? Not many means I have to splash on more cash, otherwise, I can save some money.
The flash chip lasts way longer than any consumer SSD on the market. Modern NOR flash lasts at least 100K erases. It is not some wimpy NAND flash there. My own flashcart shows no signs of dying yet and it has been in use since 2007. I have only had few thousand erases on it though...
100K? I'm going for the cheaper one then. If I did 4 writes everyday for the rest of my life, it would last at least 68 years. I'm 24 now, and I doubt I'll be using this at 92 years old =P
Mega Everdrive is known to be compatible with Ultimate Mortal Kombat Trilogy, a ROM hack that is over 10 MB in size. It is probably compatible with the other UMK3 hacks out there. Ultimate Mortal Kombat Revelations and Ultimate Mortal Kombat [SMD]. Then there's the MKII hack Mortal Kombat II Unlimited. Those hacks are larger than the largest commercially released game I think. That means the Mega Everdrive may be compatible with other such hacks that are really large.
Seeming as games aren't really meant to be over 4MB (to my knowledge), this will make me feel like I'm not using real hardware if I bypass this. If that makes sence =P Not really into MK, so I can pass on this. I think the Everdrive MD would be the way to go for me, saving me at least £40. Don't get me wrong, Mega Everdrive is good, but expensive for what it is. Using savestates and games over 10MB, feels like I'm using an emulator on the MD (I know it's not, but still, it doesn't feel right).
The Ultimate MK Trilogy hack has been proven to work on real hardware. Someone made his own cart and got it running. I seen a video somewhere. Also, Pier Solar may also be over 4 MB. So if that ever gets dumped and you want to play it on a real system without buying the rare cart, then Mega Everdrive is your best bet.
Turns out I may have to get the Mega Everdrive anyway, seeming as the Everdrive MD seems to be sold out on most popular sites and not getting more. There's a few from other countries who don't speak English, so I rather not risk that. Anyone in UK have a Everdrive MD to sell? =P A quick question though as I couldn't see it on Google or on any Youtube reviews. With the Mega Everdrive, if you load a game into memory and play it, can you turn the MD off, take the SD card out then turn it back on and go back to the game you last loaded? Same way as the Everdrive MD works (the game stayed in flash memory). Or do you have to always keep the SD card in and always load a game?
I bought an Everdrive MD from the above site. It may be from Ukraine (is that right?), but I received it faster than I was expecting. He IS the guy that develops these. And from the research I had gathered he can be trusted not to rip you off. Hope that helps you with a decision. EDIT: Also, I live in the States, so you should get it faster than I did.
Haha. Anyway, I've already checked via this site, and I didn't really want to get it from other countries if I could help it, because of import tax and that, it'll come to the same price as the Mega Everdrive (if I bought that in the UK). Anyway, my question about the Mega Everdrive is still unresolved (if anyone noticed). Will games still be in memory after a switch off and removed SD card?
Game fades in seconds after power off, unless you chill it in liquid nitrogen. It is SDRAM inside, needs power and constant refreshing.
Too expensive =P Cheers mate, thanks for your answers. I'm now 100% sure. I'm gonna get the old version. For all my needs, useful for testing my hack and others, and some classics I used to play. It can do all the stuff I want it, so it's pointless paying an extra £40 - £50 for the better one when the old one can do just what I want =P EDIT: Retrogate.com was the only one with Everdrive MD for sale. Everywhere was sold out. So I bought it from there, via paypal of course. Anyone used retrogate.com before? EDIT2: Nevermind, just got told it's Krikzz own site, so I think I'm pretty safe there.
As a tech member, I fear I should know this, but I specialise in 68k asm. So here I go. My new EverdriveMD came today and will test it tonight once I can get to my parents tools (drill the hole in cartridge, etc). I'm going to try my "Sonic 2 Time Attack" game, but due to the cheats system, when in any level, it does write to the SRAM every single frame. Stupid question, but is this bad for real hardware? It won't stress it at all, right? I can easily take the cheat system out, it's mainly in place because it's very easy to cheat using emulators and with hardware, it isn't. But thought I'd ask either way.
If the cart uses something like EEPROM instead of battery backed ram, yes, it's a HUUUUUUUUUGE problem. You only get 100,000 or so writes, and you're doing thousands per hour. The EverdriveMD uses FRAM, which is rated for about 1,000,000,000 writes or more, so it's not nearly so bad, but I'd still change that in case someone uses your game on a cart that uses EEPROM.
Cheers. I tried it and it works fine, but I have taken the cheat system out for hardware purposes. Although, I don't want to share that version out, otherwise I'll start seeing a lot of people posting times when cheated =P Either version works fine, but because of what you mentioned, I will use my new version for hardware only =)
