Is a Knockoff Mega Everdrive Worth the Money?

An E-v-e-r drive MD, as listed on Wish.com, $38

Over the summer I ordered something on Wish. (My wife reminds me that this is often a bad idea.) However, I had read some good things about flash carts, and I decided to order a Chinese knockoff Everdrive MD. Why not order the name-brand? Well, the Chinese E-v-e-r drive MD cartridge (seriously, that's how it's listed) was only $38. An actual Everdrive MD will run you $54 plus the price of an SD card, roughly $65 when all is said and done. The E-v-e-r drive MD was $38, plus about 5 dollars for shipping ($43 total). Plus, it came equipped with a 16 gigabyte SD card pre-installed with all of the necessary software.

Now, if you've ever ordered anything from Wish.com, you know that it takes for-freaking-ever for anything to arrive from there. I mean, it's being shipped all the way from China, so I guess that's to be expected. Therefore, I had some time on my hands as I awaited my new little toy. I spent that time getting together roms of all of the cartridges in my Genesis collection, plus roms of any other Genesis or Master System game I owned on a compilation disk or mini-system. I had to gather the roms, then extract each because the E-v-e-r drive MD can only use .gen, .md, .smd, or .bin files. This took me a while, but by the time my new flash cart showed up, I was ready to install my games. I won't tell you how much time this process took, but trust me, it was a while!

It turns out that I wasted all that time. The Mega Driver (the name printed on the actual cartridge when it arrived) had all of those games pre-installed, plus game hacks. I even had access to a good many unreleased games in the public domain. The only thing the Mega Driver doesn't do is load Sega CD images, which is a minor complaint seeing that even the actual Mega Everdrive x7 won't do that, and that thing runs for $183.

So why would anyone buy a brand-name Everdrive? Speed. The Chinese Mega Driver (aka E-v-e-r drive MD, among other aliases) takes a few seconds to load a new game into memory. Also, it won't run either Virtua Racing or Mega Man: The Wily Wars. (Then again, neither will a brand-name Mega Everdrive.) According to Krikzz.com, another drawback of a clone is that it will only rewrite the flash memory 100,000 times. I'm not sure where they got that number, but I'd guess they pulled it out of thin air. What they're trying to express is that their device uses more durable components, and that's probably true. Still, I'll probably be long dead before I change the game in my knockoff Mega Driver 100,000 times.

 Another cool thing about the clone I bought is that it allows me to region-switch the bios on my Sega CD, just like the Mega Exerdrive x7. This enables me to play Japanese and European Sega CD games which were unreleased in the USA, like Night Striker, Ninja Warriors, and Sengoku Denshou.

Night Striker

So, was it a good purchase? Heck yeah! For one, it saves wear and tear on my real Genesis carts. Add to that the ability to add homebrew and unreleased game roms, and the Mega Driver/E-v-e-r drive MD was a great purchase. The thing is, you only notice the speed difference when changing games. I've been playing an Sword of Vermillion lately, which means keeping the same game in memory, so it boots right up with no loading time. Let me show you in a handy pro/con comparison...

Pros:
-Pre-loaded with a ton of games
-Cheap
-Allows you to change Sega CD bios
-Allows you to use Game Genie codes

Con:
-It may take a few seconds to change which game you have loaded
-A few of the pre-loaded games don't run (like Mega Man: The Wily Wars)
-Durability (?)

My recommendation is that if you want to buy an Everdrive for your Sega Genesis, go with a clone. Unless you're one of those people whose head will explode if he has to wait a few seconds for something to load, it's a perfect solution for gamers and collectors alike.

Do video games turn today's youth into quitters?

I am 42 years old, so I'm entitled to the occasional fit of "good old days" ranting. To me, the 1980's were halcyon days. Sure, we had no cell phones, no Internet, and no disc-based gaming. Video games were, at best, cartoonish or badly-pixellated renderings of objects and people that you interacted with on a 2D plane. You tended to see a bit of interference in the background of your TV set from other channels as you played on channel 3. Still, the games were fun back then. Plus, you actually had to have some skill to play them.

You were constantly challenged by the games you played. All games were in essence a form of competition. You were out to beat your last high score, or even better, your friends' high scores. There were levels, but most games had no end to them; they just looped around, at least until Super Mario Bros. changed that paradigm. Even then, you had to beat the game using only a set number of lives and continues.

You tried and failed and tried again and again, or you realized that you had wasted $50, which in that time was a small fortune to a kid. So you sat Indian-style on the living room floor for hours struggling through Bionic Commando. The first few times you failed to make it through, but eventually you learned the proper techniques and tricks and your skills developed to the point that you actually finished the game, to be rewarded with an awesome end-scene:

The point is that video games back then were challenging. You often lost, but you had to keep trying until you got it right.

Nowadays, video games are risk-free ventures. I say this as someone who loves these games, but notices that the difficulty factor is very low. Skyrim is crazy awesome, but the worst thing that might happen to your character is that he'll lose some nice loot and have to start back at the last auto-save. Don't get me started about the Lego games... The only challenge is from the brick-earning sections after you've finished the main story line. They remind me of the Barney game on Genesis.

 We bought this game for my baby brother, who soon realized that no matter how hard you tried, Barney couldn't be killed. If you jumped off a cliff, Barney would float back up holding a balloon. No enemies existed to do him any damage. There was no danger in the game, and even my baby brother got bored with it within a day and went back to trying to pass the first level of Sonic the Hedgehog.

So now, as a middle school teacher, I deal with a bunch of kids who are utterly distraught if they make mistakes. They don't want to have to struggle or work for a win. The concept of trying and trying again is alien to them. If they can't grasp and idea or skill the first time they try it out, they want to give up. "I can't do it!" they cry after one attempt.

It's the video games, I swear!

These kids need to play Dark Souls. Now, there's a game that will put some hair on a young man's chest! That game makes you fight for every win. If you fail to beat the first-level boss, you start all the way back over at the very freakin' beginning. For the first several tries, you despise the game. Some choice vocabulary may even depart from between your lips if you're not careful. That all just makes the final victory even sweeter, provided you stick with the game long enough to enjoy it. It's a life lesson that most kids haven't learned.

So recently I decided to introduce my kids to the world of the Atari 2600. I made them play each game enough to gain a fair amount of skill. To up the ante, I had my two youngest compete against each other for high scores. They played Pac-Man, Galaxian and Frogger. Now they want to keep playing because they enjoyed getting better and better with each try. It was a pretty sweet idea for family night if I do say so myself.

I asked them what they learned and they said that you need to keep trying even when things were difficult. I told them that was called perseverance. Then we ate some ice cream. After that, they asked if they could keep playing Atari and I gladly obliged.

Kids these days need a lesson in perseverance. It's a quality they sadly lack. It's an essential quality of a self-sufficient adult. I know video games aren't exclusively to blame, and I'm not suggesting Bethesda make the next Elder Scrolls nigh-impossible to beat. However, may I suggest that we play some of the classic, challenging games with our kids? Dust off the old Atari, NES or even Sega. You'll be pleasantly surprised!

Why Every Gamer Needs a Dreamcast

The Sega Dreamcast set first-day sales records when it debuted on 9/9/99. It boasted the first 128-bit processor in a game system, built-in online connectivity, an innovative memory card that doubled as a miniature hand-held gaming device, and a proprietary disc that could hold one full gigabyte of information. It ran a version of Windows CE for easy programming, or programmers could access the CPU and GPU directly. Its GPU was a special version of the PowerVR processor used in PCs of the time. Its processors could render up to 7 million polygons per second, making it almost 20 times as powerful, polygon-wise, as the Playstation 1.

When the next wave of 128-bit systems hit, they were billed as much more powerful than the Dreamcast. Let's check the numbers:

Nintendo 64 - @100,000 pps (polygons per second), but with major additional graphic effects
Sega Saturn - @200,000 pps, slightly fewer depending on the effects used
Sony Playstation - @360,000 pps depending on the effects being used

Sega Dreamcast - @7million pps
Nintendo Gamecube - @16 million pps
Sony Playstation 2 - @66 million pps
Xbox - @100 million pps

Nintendo Wii - @65 million pps
Sony Playstation 3 - @333 million pps (as assessed by outside testers)
Xbox 360 - @500 million pps

By the way, none of these maximum polygon counts reflects what's actually going to happen in a game situation. In a game, you might see about half of the benchmarked pps being used, largely to avoid overtaxing the system and messing up gameplay. Notice a few things, however.

1. Out of the three 32/64-bit era systems, the N64 had the most amazing graphics, but could render the fewest polygons per second.
2. The Dreamcast and Gamecube numbers were not far apart.
3. Gamecube graphics were indistinguishable from most PS2 and Xbox graphics.
4. Games that really pushed what the Dreamcast could do would look right at home on the other 128-bit systems.

Some examples:

Dead or Alive 2

 

 



Ferrari F355 Challenge

 

 

Sega GT

 

Shenmue

 

Skies of Arcadia

 

 

 

Soul Calibur

 

 

However, let's not spend too much time rehashing ancient history. (I may have done that already.) Modern systems (Xbox One, PS4) put anything before them to shame, and they haven't even begun to push what the machines can do. It's not all about the polys, or the Teraflops or whatever. It's about the games. The Dreamcast was the first game system to create convincing graphics. I remember my father-in-law watching us play UFC and asking who was winning, and being surprised it was a game and not a Pay Per View match.

 

There's another, even more important reason to own a Dreamcast -- it emulates other systems very, very well. If you want to back up all of your old Atari 2600, NES, Genesis, and NeoGeo Games, the Dreamcast can and will play them, all this without having to mod the system.

 

That's right, no modding!

 

Yes, I know your PC can do all of that as well, maybe even your cell phone. But there's nothing quite like laying back on the couch with an actual console controller in your hand, playing games on an actual TV. The Dreamcast also makes a great base for building an arcade unit. (I'll show mine off in a later post.)

 

Last but not least, the Dreamcast was made to run in VGA mode with a special attachment, and that signal can be upconverted to 1080p with the right equipment. This means it will look right at home on your HDTV.

 

Additionally, because of the ease of use of the Windows CE operating system, people are still making games for Dreamcast. My favorite homebrew site is theisozone.com. There you will find all the tools you need to back up your games from older systems onto discs that play on Dreamcast, plus a host of new, homebrew titles, some surprisingly awesome.

 

If, like me, you are a gaming nerd, you NEED a Sega Dreamcast. Luckily for you, they are cheap, plentiful, and easy to find. (Click here to find one.) Take my advice, friend, and enjoy yourself.