For years, my Sega Genesis that I’ve had since 1993 just kinda sat there on my shelf. I did play it maybe a couple times a year. But I play my Nintendo Switch a lot more often, and before that my Playstation 3, and before that my Nintendo Wii. It is a relic of my childhood. However, in my online wanderings I began to hear of a device that allows you to hack your Sega Genesis, in a way. And they make them for all the other old cartridge-based game systems. The Everdrive. It allows you to play emulated roms on your actual game system. You can have every single Sega Genesis game on one cartridge. Obviously this is something I could have bought years ago, but you see I’ve been living under a rock for quite some time and only heard of Everdrive sometime last year, you’ll have to excuse me. Now I had experimented with emulation before, so I’m not completely out of the loop. I have played some rom hacks people have made for the Sonic games (some favorites including Kirby and Yoshi in the first two Sonic games, and all three Sonic games with Sally Acorn from the Sonic cartoon who never previously appeared in a video game, the long overdue Knuckles in Sonic 1, and others). I played these on a laptop, but I thought about how amazing it would be to play those on an actual Sega Genesis. So I figured I could buy it, sell my old games, and it would end up paying for itself. I’m not bothered about being a collector really, I just want to be able to play the games when the mood strikes me. I do have a bit of sentimentality wrapped up in my old game cartridges, but in the end they’re just taking up space on my shelf. As long as I still have a way to play the games, it’s all good. It also turned out that one of the games I’ve had since I was a kid, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist, is now worth a lot. Amazon is selling it for $133! And I still have the box and everything. So I would not only break even but make quite a profit by replacing my games with this Everdrive, and I would have access to more games than I had ever dreamed of.
Of course, nothing is ever that easy. I was in for a rather rude awakening when I discovered what it would take to get it to work. I bought the Everdrive, expecting it to already have the games on it, but it turns out you need to purchase a micro SD card and put the games on it yourself. Makes sense I suppose, from a copyright perspective. Perhaps it was dumb of me to think the games would just be on the thing. I am not that experienced with technology, and previously thought SD cards had gone the way of the floppy disc in favor of USB flash drives. I guess something has now superseded flash drives. These microscopic little micro SD cards hold like 32 gigabytes. I wish I had an mp3 player that took micro SD cards. I’d have a list of songs so long that it wouldn’t repeat itself for months. Tiny little thing though. I mean the original SD cards were tiny enough, did they really need to be even smaller? I better not lose it or let my kid eat it. I probably sound old fashioned. In any event, I made the additional purchase. This entire process could have been made a lot easier, by the way, if they had explained this on the website, and included an instruction manual with the device, but all it came with was just the cartridge. You have to dig the manual up on the internet. Maybe the cartridge could have at least come with a slip of paper with the URL to the manual on it? Or have it written somewhere on the box? Maybe? They expect you to just figure everything out yourself. It took a lot of internet research to find out what to do.
I found out where to get all the game files, which I suppose I will keep hush-hush. Nearly 1,700 games, on one cartridge. And that’s not including the rom hacks, which I’ll discuss later. Something I would never have dreamed possible as a kid. Quite an upgrade from the ten or so games I had before. Getting it to work was a pain though. It felt like you had have a degree in computer programming to get the thing working. I had to download a certain file from the Everdrive website, start a folder called MEGA on the SD card as the “root” of the card, as it’s called, and extract the zip file into that folder, then put all the games into the folder as well but divide it into alphabetical subfolders because the Everdrive can only display so much at once, and even after doing everything by the book I still kept getting an error message when I tried to turn the system on. After digging and digging on the internet I found out I had to reformat my SD card, another fun project, which erased the SD card and undid all the work I had done, then put all the games back on the SD card, remake all the folders and unzip and extract all of the game files before I could play the games (I still have only unzipped the files for the games I intend to play, I’m not unzipping 1,700 files one at a time!)
Once that headache was over though, it was all worth it. I can now play every Sega Genesis game ever, plus the rom hacks. I could replay games I had lost over the years, like World of Illusion with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Primal Rage which I lost in the move to Florida, and games I remember renting from Blockbuster but never owning, like Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster’s Hidden Treasure (a surprisingly good platformer that still stands up today; Konami made it and they rarely disappoint). The Everdrive can even save games; not a lot of Sega Genesis games even had save features, but it’s good for RPGs like the Shining Force and Phantasy Star games, and Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Best get in the habit of pressing the reset button, that’s how you save. The main attraction though are those rom hacks. I already had several Sonic rom hacks on my computer as I mentioned, but after digging around the internet I found more rom hacks. Weird stuff like Ninja Turtles, Beavis and Butthead or Ren and Stimpy in Streets of Rage 2, and quite a few Shining Force hacks. I found a few original games too, like a weird bootleg Super Mario Bros. game that’s only real draw is that it’s a Mario game on a Sega system, but plays like crap. And another weird one where it’s Sonic in a Mario game, but is also really glitchy with bad controls. And of course endless Sonic hacks I hadn’t heard of yet. As much as I love them I kind of think Sonic hacks are a bit overdone, and I wish there were more hacks of other games. But a lot of them are practically brand new, original games. Unique stages and music and even move sets, not to mention characters from later in the series or entirely different games, like the aforementioned Kirby and Yoshi hacks. How can I ever go back to playing the original versions again when there are so many better hacked versions of the Sonic games out there now? No more can I go back to playing a Sonic game without characters that aren’t supposed to be in them.
Sega of Japan may hate you, Princess Sally Acorn, but your fans still love you.
Yes, I didn’t need those game cartridges anymore. And yet, parting with some of them was still difficult. I still plan on keeping a couple of them for old times sakes, but I’m selling the games that might be worth something. I always thought I would only ever sell them out of desperation, like if I really needed the money or else I would starve or be out on the street, but I’m actually kind of glad I’m selling them not because I’m desperate but because I’m choosing to. It’s less sad that way. It turned out that my copy of The Lost World: Jurassic Park still in the cardboard case with an instruction manual was worth over $100 too, which I never knew.
Those cheap cardboard cases used towards the end of the Sega Genesis’ run must not have survived in large numbers. I never knew I was sitting on a small gold mine all this time. This money will go towards getting an Everdrive for my Nintendo 64. Then I can sell all of those games to make the money back, and have way more games than ever before. Plus, I’ve heard the N64 Everdrive plays NES games too. That ought to be fun, never thought I’d play Super Mario Bros. 3 with a Nintendo 64 controller. In memory of my collection, here are a few more I sold off, which were still complete:
Kinda sad. I remember getting Pac-Man 2 for Christmas in 1996. When the richer kids already had an N64 or a Playstation. I was obsessed with this game. But, it’s not like you can take it with you to the afterlife. As long as I can still play the games when I want to, these are just taking up space.
Another casualty in all this is my old RF adapter. It was finally time for an upgrade. After all these years, I finally bought AV cables for my Sega Genesis for much better picture quality. I did the same thing for my VCR a few years ago which greatly improved the picture quality, it was past due for my Genesis. Maybe thirty years from now I’ll finally get an HDMI adapter for my Genesis, eh? But I thought I would take a moment to thank the Sega Genesis RF adapter for its decades of service. Sure it may have produced fuzzy picture quality, but it’s the only RF adapter I ever had that just slid right on and off. No need to rotate the end of it around about fifty times before it is attached tightly enough and then only be able to unscrew it with a pair of pliers to avoid making my fingers bleed trying to get the damn thing off. Or you think you finally screwed it on tightly enough only for it to randomly fall off again. I hated that. Kids these days don’t know the struggle. In fact I might keep it around in case I ever need to screw in a cable again, it even made that job easier because I could attach it to the RF adapter instead of the TV itself. But then again, who needs cable TV these days? Anyway, I don’t understand why all RF adapters couldn’t have been designed this way.
As for the Mega Everdrive, I wish I could go back and time and give this device to my ten year old self. It would have blown his young impressionable mind. Now to get one for my Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo and NES.
