Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Cartridge gaming is back! – Evercade EXP”.
Hear that I think it’s kind of retro time this is the evercade X exp experience whatever. Basically, what it is is it’s a emulation handheld that takes cartridges, the boxes very plain, there’s there’s nothing else to it, there’s a little bit of RGB here, but I don’t know if that indicates anything. Oh okay, so it’s a box within a box kind of thing. It comes with the TOA plan, arcade kit. This is a cartridge of TOA plan. Arcade games. It’S one of the things that the evercade x or evercade lineup is actually really good.
For is a lot of these games. Basically, like arcade games, don’t really get re-releases very often, but they do on the uppercade uh you get a little keychain here. Let me get it out of the the shape of a of a cartridge.
What’S on the other side, insert cartridge yeah, I don’t know if you want to insert this one, but maybe it fits if it does that’d be cool. You get a carrying case, so you got a little spot for the the handheld itself and for some games yeah. They got little pockets in here sub Pockets.
Uh you get a little cleaning cloth evercade, so you got ever Kate X, the console itself, Tate. What that basically means is vertical and that’s one of the party tricks of the evercade x is that you can actually hold it this way and play vertical Shooters and I’m looking forward to trying that out. Wow.
Unlike the outer box, this box is just crammed with all kinds of stuff yeah some Street Fighter. On this side you got some uh Mega Man and 1942. On the other side, I guess this is a Capcom bundle, yeah games from Capcom and Iran. Okay, so I guess this might be like a collector’s edition pack or something I’m not entirely sure. This is what you would get normally if you buy it, yeah a fair number of decent Capcom games in here we’ve got Street Fighter 2 hyper fighting uh, all the Mega Man wait Mega Man and Mega Man 2 and Mega Man X, interesting selection.
Let’S get this guy out of the box and see what it looks like ah yeah now the original evercade really looked plasticky, and this does too, but it looks a lot more premium. It reminds me of how the DS Light looked and felt when they first announced it, whereas the original evercade had the red accents and it all kind of looked kind of me d-pad I mean it’s okay, it’s serviceable. It doesn’t really feel all that infinitive, like it kind of moves pretty freely. Maybe that’ll be good for fighting games buttons, though the face buttons, actually they’re.
Okay, there’s more snap to the Y button up here than there is to the a button down here. This feels a little bit more mushy, whereas this is a little bit snappier. It’S not a huge difference, but you know you’ll notice it uh, oh, and these these are also a little bit mushy, but it’s probably fine. It is a little awkward to hold like this, though just saying there there could used to be like a little a little indent or something on the back here, but it’s just flat so holding it like this you’re. Just like I mean it’s like holding your phone by this little part of it down here. It’S not an amazing experience, but hey you can do it on the bottom.
Here we’ve got a USB type c and a headphone output Jack, don’t know what this button is for. This is obviously the volume controls, and I don’t know what this is either some kind of light. Oh, it’s it’s marked with a t. So presumably this is the mode to switch over to Tate so like vertical so like.
If your game is like this – and you know you want to do full screen, you’d hit the T, and then you do that and of course, you’ve got the great big honkin cartridge slot on the back there, and I think the reason it’s that big. I mean it doesn’t have to be. They actually have full compatibility, at least as far as I can tell from the marketing materials with the original evercade cartridges, which I think they now have like, 30 or more, all of which have well most of which have more than five games on them. A lot of them actually have like more than eight.
Also, you have a little mini HDMI port up there. If you want to plug it into your TV, not sure if that’s something that you’d really want to do, but it’s there shoulders are and they’re fine. It probably wouldn’t be too bad. I mean these are kind of older games, so you’re not going to be using these Triggers on the left and right so often but uh. You know it’s something to take note of uh yeah. Here we go so right. This is the irm arcade cartridge.
Presumably, the Capcom games are just built into this thing, so I was correct that t is the Tate mode button and that light when it’s red it’s charging when it’s blinking green, it’s booting up and when it’s blinking red it’s time to charge. I appreciate this. This is actually nicely laid out, so this is a really nice touch.
I like this. Maybe it’s just the Nostalgia in me: liking old instruction manuals you can flip through on the toilet. I don’t know, let’s pop a game out and see what that looks like okay, you also get an instruction manual with this much the same, it’s a different form factor. So why cartridges I mean, aside from the fact that it’s like honestly pretty satisfying to just do that.
Oh, oh, okay! It’S a little! A little tight on the current gen console I’ll say that that was a little harder than I would have expected. It’S a pretty tight, fit to get it into the slot and I’m not sure if that’s by Design or if it’s just because this is brand new and it needs some time to wear in there’s more to it than just getting the games plus. All of these are fully licensed, so it’s not a piracy console or anything like that, speaking of which foreign that’s not even like half of them, like they’ve, got 30 of these. Now I think we’ve got in television. We’Ve got Atari. These are new games. I think these are evercade exclusives, how about that the Atari, Lynx, collection, jaliko and, of course, we’ve got. I say, of course, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Galco how about we turn it on and see how it plays.
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Today, foreign speakers don’t sound amazing. So the first thing we get is our cartridge, which is the Iram arcade collection. Then we can go over to our built-in games. There’S hidden games, we can unlock games.
I would prefer that they were already unlocked. Presumably this is maybe the downloadable section. I don’t know it says coming soon and what I presume are the settings. Okay, so display okay, cool.
We have aspect ratios, so we have the original ratio. We have Pixel Perfect, which will be an integer scale. It’Ll give you black borders most of the time, but that way you won’t have any weird scaling.
Artifacts like blur or misshapen pixels uh and full screen is, if you are a monster and you like to play your 4×3 games in 16×9. I’M not sure why this oh right because of Tate mode, okay, Dynamic rate control, I guess it has adaptive sync, I’m not sure why you’d have that off. Oh wait, maybe maybe that’s not what that is.
Maybe what that is, is speeding up or slowing down the game to sync to the refresh rate of the display. Maybe that’s why it’s off by default. I don’t think that this has any settings information in that little uh little quick start guide, so I’d have to check the online manual and secret okay. It’S got a code entry screen, I guess for unlocking games, maybe again it’s cute, but I’m pretty sure that I would prefer to just have these features unlocked see how Mega Man 2 looks.
They’Ve got all the play, controls and stuff here too found right to me. No, it’s not because of the volume it’s like bit crushed, which is strange because it’s 8-bit but yeah, that’s not clipping. That’S that’s just gritty. I’M not sure why that is, but I guess it doesn’t really matter if uh, if the gameplay is okay, oh man, that sounds crunchy. Now, that’s that’s unpleasant! I’M sorry! I don’t know how the headphone output sounds or how the HDMI output sounds.
But these speakers don’t sound very good with this. Oh that’s the menu key. Well, while we’re here uh, quick, save we can, I think, maybe customize the controls.
No, we just have the controls. Okay, it’d, be nice. If you had control customization as well, I can see myself hitting the menu button a lot.
Instead of hitting start, these buttons are lower than the menu button. I’M going to turn this down. Uh uh.
Did I not hit a? Does a DOT jump? No, it doesn’t. Oh okay, it’s B! Oh I don’t like this. I, like I like this layout like pressing, X, Pursuit and uh a to jump. I don’t think I can do that. No, I can’t change the controls. Oh that’s! I don’t like this um a couple of frames of lag. Well, I mean it feels pretty responsive, but I don’t I’m not happy with the NES simulation uh. Let’S try a vertical game.
Okay, so I can Tate mode that I guess select for credits. Yeah dump coins in there uh. This also sounds a little crunchy. I’M talking about rips really.
Well, though it is a little like. I have to brace my hand in a different way. What I’m doing is I’m holding my hand like that, so that I’m actually like supporting the the higher part of the console and then I’m like kind of tweaking my my thumbs down it’s like kind of it’s not super comfortable, but it works. So, when you’re in Tate mode, even these on-screen controls up here, use these these lower buttons.
Ah, I keep thinking the confirm is on the right, because that’s kind of how it is in well on the NES and also in like most Japanese controllers. What’S a more modern Title Here I mean Breath of Fire like Super Nintendo yeah, let’s run Mega Man X and see how that works. Oh I’m not looking forward to how this sounds based on what I’ve heard so far, that’s actually not bad. The stereo is pretty good too yeah.
The sound doesn’t sound bad, the uh Graphics. I mean that doesn’t look terrible to me um, but it’s it’s kind of small. So it’s difficult to see. If there are any major errors, it looks like the stretch might be making some inconsistent pixels here on these status bars yeah.
It’S not something I can see at this like this angle to show the camera. But if I look at it straight on, I think I would notice now you can kind of tell in uh X’s health bar up here. I’M not sure if that looks off or not I’m it’s a small screen um. Otherwise, it seems to play pretty okay for the Super Nintendo games, see.
Look it’s just the NES games that it kind of sucks for, like the emulator, is just bad, like the audio sounds like it’s being mixed at like 11 kilohertz or something which is not enough. 1.5 gigahertz, presumably it’s just an arm of some kind, with four Gigabytes of system memory you can get by with, like maybe a gig or 512 Megs, depending on the complexity of the operating system. So, presumably it’s because of all the the artwork and stuff that they had to preload here. I think that CPU is definitely fast enough to do accurate, NES and super net NES emulation. So I’m not sure why it’s like that, maybe it can be fixed in a firmware update.
Obviously this is software based, so it’s not like it’s going to be fixed in that way. I guess that’s one of the advantages to having this platform is that you know when you buy these games a future revision of the console could actually make them play better or give you more features to make the gameplay experience better. It’S tough to to really fully analyze the gameplay experience, because I don’t know if it’s going to be the same throughout the lifespan of this console, but those NES games.
They just sound bad at 149 for the console and about 20 or 25 dollars for each of those. It’S not a bad value. It’S just, I feel like there are better ways to play these games.
It’S tough! I want to like this, but the quality of the emulation, at least on the NES side, was just unbearable. I don’t know, maybe that’s just a Capcom thing. Maybe each of these games has its own encapsulated emulator, and this is just running it.
I don’t know what the architecture of the system looks like if you’re going to carry this around with you, I mean, assuming you have the official carrying case. You got this and you’ve got room for two games in here. I guess make sure that you choose the games.
You want to play like it’s, it’s a little inconvenient to carry around. You know your library right. This would be better, I think, for the Home console version of the evercade like the verses as nice as the cartridges are a downloadable experience would probably be a lot nicer and I don’t see a spot for an SD card or anything like that.
So I don’t know how much storage is even on here. They need to improve the emulation. The console itself feels pretty solid. I mean it is a little chunky, but that’s okay, because it makes it easier to hold unless you’re holding it like this, in which case you know, but at least you have the option right so yeah, it seems like the software is letting it down mostly and The the software ecosystem as well, it’s this biggest strength and its biggest weakness. I think why is it getting warm? I mean it, it doesn’t seem like it is really doing much like right now. It doesn’t seem like it’s doing much, but it’s still warm. It feels like they’ve got a lot of work to do. They’Ve got a lot of work to do on the software ecosystem and they’ve got a lot of work to do on. You know just just making sure that the experience is okay.
Now they say you can get four to five hours of battery life on this. That’S enough, I guess I mean it’s not going to be similar to the old school game boy or anything like that. I mean it’s, it’s comparable to a switch.
Assuming that’s correct. I mean I mean: we’ve been playing this whole time and it hasn’t ticked down at all. It was always at uh three bars on the battery as it is right now.
I would recommend it only if you really want these cartridges and that’s really the bottom line. There are better handhelds to have, and if you have a game collection already, you can dump your own games and there’s no piracy required for following short circuit. We have plenty of other things like this and not like this there’s retro time, there’s not retro time.
What time is it now you decide? .