Everdrive 64 v3 released!

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m happy to announce to you all that the Everdrive 64 v3 has now been released on retrogate.com! I might go into greater detail on what the Everdrive 64 is in a later post, but for the time being, I’ll just say that it is a flash cart fro the Nintendo 64. That means that you put a bunch of ROMs on it and then run them directly from your N64 console, no emulator or PC middleman needed.

I have the Everdrive v2 which I use because most of my carts are at my parents house and I figured that it would be cheaper for me to just get an Everdrive rather than get new carts or wait to go visit them. It works quite well, there are a few ROMs that I can’t quite get to work, but I’ve gotten every western release I have to work just fine.

What’s new with the Everdrive 64 v3

The Everdrive 64 v3 has all the same attributes of the v2, but with a little bit extra. First of all, the cart now includes a slot for the battery save. This means that it can now support in-game clocks like in Doobutsu no Mori (Animal Crossing). It also fixes the problem that existed when saving to the cart where you had to reset the game before switching the console off. I must admit that this caught me by surprise once and I lost quite a bit of save data, but that’s how you learn not to do that. The only other advertised feature is “Near to 100% compatibility with n64 game library”, which was also advertised for the v2 as “99% compatible”.

Now that you see that the only two improvements are the batter and the restart/save fix, the question is “is it worth it?”

Well, let’s look at the prices. The bare-bones Everdrives are $99 for the v2 and $167 for the v3. That means you’re paying $68 more for those new features, a whole 68% more (obviously).

Personally, I don’t think that it warrants the increase in price. If it was $10 or maybe even $20 increase, it might be worth it. But $68 to be able to play animal crossing? You could just import the real game and it would be cheaper.