I’ve got a lot of retro action setting up, so hopefully will post some crazy about the “HxC” floppy emulator and Pandora->TV-out, but for today .. the EverDrive!

Flash cart primer; early generation consoles often used ‘cartridges’ to contain the games; the cart was basicly a big plastic shell around a ROM chip (and possibly some extra hardware) that contained the game, artwork, audio and so forth. Switching carts for each game was part of the experience, but carts could on rare occasions break down or get lost .. or if you had a collection of dozens or hundreds of games, just become a nuisance to store or locate. (Who remembers the Wall of Atari each of us had, with colourful carts and cassette tapes filling a whole wall of your rec-room?) The flash cart was designed by third parties to address these needs (and of course, to balls out encourage piracy; nowadays the goals are more honourable — preservation, encouraging homebrew game development, but back in the day they were more balls out about the intended use.)

“Flast carts” for consoles have been around since carts existed — back in the day you could get a flash cart for SNES while the machine was still brand new. Over the years the flash cart has become increasingly convenient to use – the originals actually used floppy disks to store game backups on! Just a few years ago, flash carts started to get more convenient — plug them into a USB cable to your PC and set them up; not bad, but still not ‘there’.

Enter the EverDrive — essentially some hardware that knows how to read universally standard SD card media and load the game ‘roms’ into its flash memory, and then pretend to just be a normal cartridge for the intended system; the designer of the EverDrive has models for the SNES, the Genesis/Megadrive, Nintendo 64,  and is working on the TG16/PCengine. Pretty darned nifty, and ultra convenient. Too bad they say (currently) the arcade Neo Geo (MVS) system is out of scope — too annoying, but it would be cool there.

EverDrive in various models is available from a number of stores, but I ordered mine from EvilD’s gp2x.de shop (disclosure; I am friends with EvilD, but he _is_ a decent and honest fellow; I could probably order from somewhere more local, but I ordered from another continent to wave the flag, ok?); its pricey (depending on model, 80EUR and up) but is pretty nifty, so if you’re a retro gaming fan and have the spare money, this is certainly a good avenue. Be nice if bulk discounts for buying a bundle (Nintendo64 + TG16 + MD + SNES .. woot :) existed.

EverDrive is a simple premise — it presents itself as a cart to the host system; on startup it offers a simple menu – load a game from SD and flash it to the EverDrive, or just fire up the game already in flash, along with some toolbox options (check the EverDrive firmware version, format an SD card, that sort of stuff.) It does support SRAM load/save but I didn’t fuss with it. It also supports all standard cart ’sizes’ (size of the game pack), though doesn’t offer custom hardware so a few games that contained extra wiring in the cart itself will not work. But in general most actual game ‘rips’ you use should work.

(If you have a Retrode you’ll be in nerd heaven; the Retrode will let you pull the game ‘rom’ from any carts you have, and then you can feed them into your EverDrive :)

Some things to note – the EverDrive is running on real hardware, not an emulator; emulators have some pretty advanced trickery such as region lock ignore, handling PAL on NTSC, emulating custom hardware some games need, being mroe relaxed about carts (allowing larger than real carts or allowing some things to occur that real hardware does not.) So a real cart rip will probably work in EverDrive, but be sure to try and run the rip of a cart that is actually for your machine (NTSC vs PAL though this can be okay, the right region, and unmodified .. many modified games might have a loader or whatever that only works in an emulator.) But if you’re like me and try and stick to the narrow road and use rips of your own carts, life is fine.

The actual process is .. turn on your SNES (or Genesis or whatever) and get the EverDrive menu; hit a button to start up the game as is, or hit another button to load up a different game and flash the EverDrive; the actual flashing process takes awhile – say 30-50 seconds depending on size of the cart, plus some time afterwards for SRAM to be cleared and fixed up; factor a couple of minutes for a game to get going .. which is just enough to annoy the heck out of a 4 year old who wants to play Super Mario.

Other than the flash time sink, its perfect; perhaps future models will speed it up, but as the flash operation is being driven by the host console itself (to keep hardware costs down on the ED unit itself?) theres probably not much that can be done speed wise.

In general, set up is easy..

1. Stick an SD into the ED and use the menu to format it (you can format it yourself on a PC as well, but to get it ‘right’ this is an easy option.); I used a 10 year old 128MB SD I had lieing around, since it was pure SD (not SDHC) and so shoudl work on _everything_, and 128MB is a hell of a lot of space when it comes to retro consoles .. no need to burn an 32GB SDHC on this ;)
2. Using a PC (or Pandora like I did!) copy over the latest firmware from the EverDrive website; I updated to firmware v11, which knows how to deal with long filenames (more than 8 character filenames, as we’re accustomed to these days) and lots of files
3. In ED boot menu, theres a firmware update option; I won’t go into it, but it works well and is pretty safe (ie: low chance to brick the unit.)
4. Now that you’re on latest firmware, use your PC and load up that SD with your SNES homebrew and cart rips

So thats it .. EverDrive is easy to use, holds as many games as your SD card allows, and works a treat.

Oh, one caveat — when I ordered the cart from gp2x.de (a German shop), he didn’t have any North American cart cases so had to supply mine with the European cart case (rounded front instead of flat front.) This actually fits fine into a NA SNES unit, but I did have to clip out a couple notches that are on the casing to block cross-continent use back in the day; pliers and 30 seconds and good to go.

Summary – for classic console gamers, EverDrive is pretty sweet.