Evercade?!

[+jgkspsx]

2 hours ago, Video said:

Here's hoping someone will eventually make something like ever card for this system. Kind of defeats the purpose of an easy cart based box with legitimate games, but would open it to those who want rather obscure titles, stuff that won't get released.

There was such a device but they have been doing their best to block it. The problem is that many companies will be reluctant to license to Evercade if the platform is associated with piracy.

[7800Knight]

They announced the next one!

 

 

Metal Mech, Stanely & The Search for Dr. Livingston (both two more obscure NES titles) and Zero Tolerance, a Genesis first person shooter much like Doom and Wolfenstein - that I rented years ago!  I'm excited!

 

A third Piko collection doesn't surprise me.  What do you think?

Edited March 12 by 7800Knight

[+jgkspsx]

The owner of Piko basically confirmed Piko 3 with Zero Tolerance months ago, so I am not at all surprised. Glad to have it confirmed, though.
 

Here’s the full game list:

 

40 Winks

Legend of Wukong

Metal Mech: Man & Machine

Motor City Patrol

Punch King

Radikal Bikers

Stanley: The Search for Dr. Livingston

Sword of Sodan

Super Bubble Pop

Zero Tolerance

 

Sword of Sodan is one of the worst Genesis games out there… I guess they included it because bad games deserve remembering too? 
 

Legend of Wukong seems like a step below the great Taiwanese RPGs on Piko 1, but another RPG is a good addition anyway.

 

Metal Mech, Stanley, and Motor City Patrol all qualify as real hidden gems. I didn’t realize Piko owned any of them. Super excited for those.

 

Zero Tolerance is a very solid FPS especially considering the system. Shame Evercades can’t do console to console link play. That would be an amazing use of the VS to handheld link cable, actually…

 

I’ve never played Punch King, Super Bubble Pop, 40 Winks, or Radikal Bikers (which was a Gaelco arcade game), but they all look decent.

 

I am sad there weren’t another five or so games here. Piko has more in their storehouse than will ever make it to Evercade and it is a shame to see their selection get stingier. Still a thoroughly solid lineup, though.

[Songbird]

Agree on Zero Tolerance. Would be great to see this have convenient link support someday on some modern rendition!

[7800Knight]

I still want to see a Neo Geo collection on Evercade!

[Agent X]

Firmware 3.0.0 was released for the original Evercade Handheld a few days ago. There's a long list of added features, which are described on this page at the official Evercade site.

 

I installed this update, and dabbled a bit with Atari Collection 1, one of the cartridges that received numerous "fixes" and alterations through this update. With regard to this collection, there's some good news, and also some bad news.

 

Two of my longtime complaints have finally been addressed:

 

1. The difficulty switches (controlled using the L and R buttons) can now be adjusted freely from B to A, and from A to B. Previously, you could switch from B to A, but after doing so, you could not adjust back to B again, unless you exited the game and reentered it.

2. The paddle knob is now recognized in Canyon Bomber and Steeplechase, as I mentioned in this post from May 2021.

 

I'm very grateful to the team at Blaze for implementing these fixes!

 

Unfortunately, at least two popular games on this collection, which previously played flawlessly, now are negatively impacted:

 

1. Asteroids had its resolution and/or aspect ratio altered. Now, if you score 10,000 or more points, the leftmost digit is clipped. It seems like they trimmed a fair chunk of the left side of the screen without regard for the score display.

2. Adventure now appears as a "wide" aspect ratio in all screen display modes. The "original" display mode (which normally shows a 4:3 ratio) now looks almost indistinguishable from the "widescreen" mode.

 

For both of these games, they should restore them to their original resolution and aspect ratio, as they were presented before the 3.0.0 update.

 

I also tried several other games (Video Pinball, Missile Command, and the aforementioned Canyon Bomber and Steeplechase), and didn't observe any noticeable graphical oddities with those games.

 

Blaze said that 3.0.0 would likely be the final firmware update for this machine, unless any serious problems were found. I feel that these are very significant and easily visible flaws (which were not present before), and hope that they'll give us at least one more update to restore these games to their former glory.

 

[+jgkspsx]

Based on what they said in the Discord chat it seems unlikely that the OG handheld will get a hotfix for it

 

They’re going to try to do a hotfix after the Linux updater is out.

[Parker77]

Piko 3 is utter crap. I'll probably pick up the Team 17 cart, even though their games were always over rated, and I've got a fully loaded A500 mini already.

[+jgkspsx]

I ordered my Piko 3 and Team 17 from Songbird.

[Songbird]

Team 17 and Piko #3 pre-orders are live! Release date is May 31.

 

https://songbird-productions.com/product/evercade-piko-interactive-collection-3/

https://songbird-productions.com/product/evercade-team-17-amiga-collection-1/

 

[+GoldLeader]

On 3/12/2023 at 3:49 PM, jgkspsx said:

 

 

 

Sword of Sodan is one of the worst Genesis games out there… I guess they included it because bad games deserve remembering too? 
 

 

 

Although I'm sure I have the ROM on an Everdrive,   I've never played Sword of Sodan.  What I remember from when I was in a band in the 90's,  was that a loose cart of the game was on the floor where we practiced, off to the side with some other random stuff.  I figure our guitarist (who owned the game) didn't care for it much either, because for years it never moved...implying he never played it.

[Bill Loguidice]

3 minutes ago, GoldLeader said:

 

Although I'm sure I have the ROM on an Everdrive,   I've never played Sword of Sodan.  What I remember from when I was in a band in the 90's,  was that a loose cart of the game was on the floor where we practiced, off to the side with some other random stuff.  I figure our guitarist (who owned the game) didn't care for it much either, because for years it never moved...implying he never played it.

Even though it didn't play particularly great, I loved Sword of Sodan on the Amiga back in the day for its audio-visuals. It was one of those games that didn't translate particularly well from the Amiga to the Genesis for a variety of reasons, including expectations having risen for that type of game. It's the epitome of clunky.

[Bill Loguidice]

I received my Evercade EXP bundle the other day and got in a little time with the new handheld and some of the built-in Capcom games. Overall, the handheld has some nice improvements over the original, although the built-in speaker is really bad and I still miss not having a Bluetooth audio option. I'm a bit disappointed in the TATE mode so far as I find the handheld a bit awkward to hold like that and the controls not feeling too great. I'll need to spend more time with it on other games to know for sure.

[+GoldLeader]

2 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

Even though it didn't play particularly great, I loved Sword of Sodan on the Amiga back in the day for its audio-visuals. It was one of those games that didn't translate particularly well from the Amiga to the Genesis for a variety of reasons, including expectations having risen for that type of game. It's the epitome of clunky.

 

Do we know for sure it's the Genesis game?  Could it be the Amiga version?  (The coolest would be if we got both!  Hey,  I can dream right?)

[Bill Loguidice]

23 minutes ago, GoldLeader said:

 

Do we know for sure it's the Genesis game?  Could it be the Amiga version?  (The coolest would be if we got both!  Hey,  I can dream right?)

Considering it's Piko and the rest of the games in the same collection (29), I'd be quite surprised if it wasn't the Genesis version. I believe Team 17 Collection 1 (C03) is the first and only cartridge thus far with anything Amiga-related.

[+jgkspsx]

1 hour ago, GoldLeader said:

 

Do we know for sure it's the Genesis game?  Could it be the Amiga version?  (The coolest would be if we got both!  Hey,  I can dream right?)

It’s the Genesis version 😕

 

New firmware is out for EXP and VS BTW!

 

And we really need a tate mode grip.

[+madman]

On 3/22/2023 at 1:21 PM, Bill Loguidice said:

I received my Evercade EXP bundle the other day and got in a little time with the new handheld and some of the built-in Capcom games. Overall, the handheld has some nice improvements over the original, although the built-in speaker is really bad and I still miss not having a Bluetooth audio option. I'm a bit disappointed in the TATE mode so far as I find the handheld a bit awkward to hold like that and the controls not feeling too great. I'll need to spend more time with it on other games to know for sure.

I'll have to listen more closely next time I play it, I never noticed poor sound from the EXP. I was never blown away by amazing sound, but also never thought it was bad. Agreed on vert mode, unusable to me personally. 

[roots.genoa]

My only complaint with the sound is the left speaker will turn on after the right one for some reason, most of the time a few minutes after starting playing. 🤔

[Bill Loguidice]

13 hours ago, madman said:

I'll have to listen more closely next time I play it, I never noticed poor sound from the EXP. I was never blown away by amazing sound, but also never thought it was bad. Agreed on vert mode, unusable to me personally. 

It's more that the speakers are very subpar, even for inexpensive handheld speakers. No big deal, of course, as headphones are not hard to come by.

 

I also wish there was a way to adjust difficulty level on some of these games, particularly some of the notoriously difficult ones. Hopefully being able to adjust dip switches on the arcade games is coming. 

[famicommander]

I don't think I'd have an issue with the sound quality if it weren't noticeably worse than the older Evercade handheld's sound. In a vacuum it's fine but it's definitely a downgrade from the older hardware and that's a minor disappointment.

[Video]

Is it actually worse, or is it speaker orentation? The original has its speaker on the systems face, while the new one pipes sound out the bottom. What is with hardware manufactures fascination with this anyways? I see this on cellphones with a screen that covers the entire front of the system, but the evercades have plenty of front real estate to put forward facing speakers on. It does "sound" worse (imo especially as you can randomly cover one or both speaker holes inadvertently now) but does it have to?

[jerseystyle]

On 3/24/2023 at 8:30 AM, Bill Loguidice said:

It's more that the speakers are very subpar, even for inexpensive handheld speakers. No big deal, of course, as headphones are not hard to come by.

 

I also wish there was a way to adjust difficulty level on some of these games, particularly some of the notoriously difficult ones. Hopefully being able to adjust dip switches on the arcade games is coming. 

Oh man 100%! I bought mine from Songbird, plus the initial launch lineup… had fun playing them but realized I can only make progress in like 20% of the games. Give me some QOL upgrades! Continues, or something. Love the Lynx collections though.

[+jgkspsx]

On 4/2/2023 at 5:01 PM, Video said:

Is it actually worse, or is it speaker orentation? The original has its speaker on the systems face, while the new one pipes sound out the bottom. What is with hardware manufactures fascination with this anyways? I see this on cellphones with a screen that covers the entire front of the system, but the evercades have plenty of front real estate to put forward facing speakers on. It does "sound" worse (imo especially as you can randomly cover one or both speaker holes inadvertently now) but does it have to?

I think it’s both. The orientation doesn’t help but just listening to the sound with the screen facing away from me sounds worse too.

 

In happier news, the Game of the Month is back and now available on the EXP! And with a native port of one of the very finest modern arcade classics, DONUT DODO!!

 

 

This has been high on my wishlist for a long time, and it’s amazing to get it as a Game of the Month for free! If this was the only game on Indie Heroes 3, it would be one of the best cartridges yet.

[+madman]

OK, after some more playing and paying attention, I now understand the speaker complaints. 

[+jgkspsx]

Part of the problem is that the NES emulator is somehow distorted on the EXP sound system even though it's fine on the OG and VS. They're apparently working on fixing that. But that doesn't excuse all of the non-NES games.