How Is Your SNES Gaming Going?

[Sarge]

I'll add a voice of support to the SD2SNES as well. It's a great piece of kit. I got it for Christmas a couple of years ago, although I paid half the cost. It's certainly been worth it. I don't know if Super FX or SA-1 will ever happen, but what it does have still puts it well ahead of any of the other carts. It's also useful that I already own the SA-1 carts I actually care about, I've got SFA2 to cover the SDD carts, and Star Ocean has an uncompressed hack.

Also, somebody actually ported Road Avenger to run on the SD2SNES. I still need to give that a shot.

[swiftzx]

Just got Tetris attack from my local game shop. Can't wait to play it wit my brother later today!

[prfsnl_gmr]

Just got Tetris attack from my local game shop. Can't wait to play it wit my brother later today!

Enjoy! It is one of the system's best games.

[mas]

I cannot wait to get my everdrives. Just gotta do my taxes now and hopefully I get enough back to get some cash in the bank and to buy the everdrives.

[Tanooki]

Smart move if you need nothing else done as they add up fast. I'm watching the GBA one in development since you can emulate older devices cleanly through the GBA.

On SNES, might be netting a complete copy of Illusion of Gaia soon, if I do that would be a fun one to go through again as it has been many years.

[Sarge]

I cannot wait to get my everdrives. Just gotta do my taxes now and hopefully I get enough back to get some cash in the bank and to buy the everdrives.

Which ones are you looking to get? Definitely let me know how they turn out. I've only got one EverDrive product (N8), and I'm very pleased with it so far. I'm sure the SNES version is fine, too, but there's no question the SD2SNES is the Cadillac of SNES flash carts. The nice thing about SNES, of course, is that you don't have to worry so much about all the mappers like the NES, and the number of special-chip games is pretty small. Same with the Genesis, as well.

[Ziggy]

If you can score a used SNES PowerPak for less than a new Super Everdrive, it's also a great option. The SNES PowerPak can only (optionally) do DSP-1, and I see the Super Everdrive V2 can optionally do DSP 1-4 (looks like it uses an FPGA to emulate the DSP chips). But the SNES PowerPak can load 96Mbit ROMs (Star Ocean hack), so there's the trade off. The Super Everdrive auto backs up saves, while you have to do it manually with the SNES PowerPak. But the SNES PowerPak has CFW with some nifty menus, making it much more user friendly than the stock FW.

Me personally, I really wanna get the Sd2snes. But a year or two ago I was able to pick up a used SNES PowerPak (from someone upgrading to the Sd2snes). It works, it just doesn't have as many features.

[Sarge]

Yeah, there's no real issues with the other carts, they're all quite usable from what I hear. Like I mentioned, the fact that there are a lot less special-chip games really helps. Heck, even the little cheap Tototek cart is probably pretty good. It's just the SD2SNES has everything happening almost instantaneously, which is awfully nice. In-game hooks mess some things up right now, but you can disable them, and they're certainly no worse (actually, quite a bit better) than using a Game Genie. The routine is pretty tightly coded.

[Ziggy]

Heck, even the little cheap Tototek cart is probably pretty good.

This was my first flash cart. It's "good" as in it works. But if you're use to the way modern flash carts work, you better stay away. You need a programmer for the cart, a computer with a (real) parallel port, and software to flash the cart. The cart does not have removable storage and can only hold 64Mbit of ROM data, a max of four games at any one time (as long as the ROM sizes added up don't exceed 64Mb) and one save file at a time. So it's definitely not as easy to use as modern flash carts. But yeah, it works! The coolest part about it is being able to use the programmer to dump real carts, as well as being able to read/write save data to/from the flash cart and real carts.

[Sarge]

Sounds just like my old Flash Advance 256M Pro for GBA. Had an external programmer, required a parallel port, and special software to flash it. Plus, you had to do all the save management yourself. I remember swapping over to Pogoshell to make things work better, but then I found out that it and the DS don't get along very well. It would corrupt saves, and I don't know if anyone ever quite figured out what was going on. I know no one I asked in the usual places had any clue. As long as I stuck with the original GBA, I was golden.

It's not terrible, actually, but it did make you think a little harder about exactly what you wanted to put on there. I also remember jumping through lots of hoops doing SRAM patches and the like, because so many games didn't want to save otherwise. Fun times!