My thoughts on my new Megadrive/Genesis Everdrive

OK so here it is my brand new EverDrive or to give it itse full name the Everdrive V3.6 Sega Megadrive Flash Cart. It came with an 8 Gig Sd Card and cost me £40 including shipping. All I actually got was the cartidge and SD card the box you can see well I made the cover myself but the cool little minature case itself is actully a case for the Japanese version of Batman, no idea why but Batman over there came in this cool little size case and for some reason I ended up with an empty one of these cases and up until now it had just sat with a random game cart in it but I thought with its small size it would make a good case for the Everdrive.

Well first things first why did I get a EverDrive? A lot of it was the fact that I now own around 200 megadrive games and with some of them being rare I thought it might be better just to put all of my games on this and let the real ones have a rest, the less I touch them the less wear and tear they will get yet with this device I can still enjoy them. I also figured I could try some homebrew and a few hacks, today for example I was playing an unfinished beta version of streets of rage 2, it had a lot of diffrences from the one we know and love but you could see the building blocks of what would become one of the best games for the system and getting to see stuff like that intrests me. Sure I could have played this beta on an emulator but there was something cool about playing it on a real megadrive on my big TV with a official pad.

So I suppose I should let everyone know how it works, well basically and fogive me if I am getting this wrong here but im trying to keep this simple, theres a memory chip in the cart and you load games on to the SD card, then using the carts software you choose a game from the SD card, its data gets dumped on to the memory chip and then the cart becomes that game. The downside is after choosing the game you wait about a minute while the game is loaded up in this way but then once its going its just like your playing the actual cart, there is no slow down or issues that I have seen in the slightest and I have tried a lot of games out, the only game I  know doesnt work with it is Virtua Racing due to the expensive extra chip that this had in it. Another brilliant part of this is that you can also load and play Master System games with this device which is brilliant especially if there are a few Master system games you want to try out but your not intrested enough to want to invest in an actual Master System.. If you own a 32X you can also put 32X games on it and plug this in your 32X and play them but I dont own one. The thing both looks and feels well made, I was worried that it might look kind of tacky or more modern than the good old megadrive close up but no it actually looks the part in everyway.

I have to say I only just got this thing but I absolutly love it and it is going to make life a lot easier in quiet a few ways, I can try strange hacks and homebrews I otherwise might not have botherd with, I can litteraly put my whole collection on it and keep my games safe, I can take this one small cart to my friends houses instead of lugging a bag full of carts and still be able to have every game I want with me without having to worry about either space or loosing an extremly rare and obscure title.... all in all I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.