When I was a kid the Super Nintendo was one of the best consoles around but unfortunately all the games cost a heck of a lot of money. I used to think wouldn't it be great if there was a cartridge that had every single game ever made but on one cart? Well back then it was science fiction but today it's reality. This here is the SD2SNES otherwise known as the SNES everdrive and it's supposed to play every single game ever made on the Super Nintendo. Let's take a look at this thing. This specific cart was sent to us by Stone Age Gamer which is a pretty cool company that takes a lot of these carts and makes them easier for consumers to get ahold of. You could buy the actual internals of this cartridge and build the whole thing yourself but I'm not really that handy so it's nice when the company goes and does it themselves. And I have to say the build quality on this thing is really cool. It comes in a really big clamshell case and it's got a really nice gold sticker on the back and well a lot of time and effort has been put into making this look like a real Super Nintendo cartridge. Even the one I had sent to me came with an SD card that has a special little SD2SNES sticker on it so that's good. Also it's 16 gigabytes and that's enough to carry every single Super Nintendo game ever made on it.
The SD2SNES is a cartridge that basically says it can play every single Super Nintendo game out there or at least a bunch of them. See they really can't do every single game because Super Nintendo is an interesting console. Most games on the Super Nintendo are well regular they just have a cartridge that just straight up uses the Super Nintendo hardware but there's a few games out there that have unique features. For instance little processor chips and additional hardware components that were included on the cartridge and the Super Nintendo can actually bypass some of its power into the cartridge itself and utilize these extra mechanics and pieces. These pieces can do pretty interesting things like the super FX chip which can basically do 3D polygonal graphics on the Super Nintendo. This is why you get games like Star Fox looking so cool when other Super Nintendo games without this chip didn't look like that. Now unfortunately cartridges like the one we're using here really can't access those pieces because they're not included on this card itself and that kind of makes it impossible to play. For now anyways. What they do promise it is going to work eventually. There's this processor that's on this cartridge called the MSU one and the MSU one is said to be able to replicate a lot of those technologies that they used to use on the Super Nintendo. In the meantime it'll play pretty much 85 per cent of the games on the Super Nintendo but things like Star Fox and any of those games that utilize those kind of effects chips well they're not going to work and that's kind of unfortunate. Especially if you're buying this cartridge hoping to play things like Star Fox 2 which you really wouldn't be able to play on a normal Super Nintendo unless you had a bootleg cartridge. But the promissory note of one of these cartridges eventually working in the future is nice because they've said that this cartridge isn't going to get any hardware revisions it's just going to get firmware updates.
Now this cartridge can play a lot of Super Nintendo games and a lot of them really well. Every single Super Nintendo game that I tried that did turn on worked perfectly fine without any glitches or without any errors which was pretty damn solid. But there's also some additional features that this cartridge is actually really good at. See it's capable of running homebrew games with some really cool perks. Now this MSU one processor I was talking about before well people have been making use of it to do some pretty damn cool things. Now one of you out there may know Rock and Roll Racing which is a really fun game utilizing a lot of modern music at the time but really cool digitized versions of the songs. What they decided to do with this new chip was basically take the original music that that game was emulating and replicate it one to one just like you were listening to it on a CD. This cartridge has the ability to do CD quality audio simply because there's so much space on the SD card and that's really cool. We were taking a look at some pretty interesting games that have whole new soundtracks just because they have so much space on this card and it runs right through a regular Super Nintendo just utilizing this new processor on this cartridge. We played The Legend of Zelda with an orchestral score and even some animated cutscenes. Seriously guys animated cutscenes on the Super Nintendo. I'm talking like mp4 animated video type stuff but unfortunately this is one of the problems you'll have with this cartridge. You see that stuff is still in its early days and it doesn't quite work perfectly. Unfortunately every time we tried out one of the video files that they have on these games they always seemed to crash. Now the technology is going to work a little bit better as time goes on we hope but as at this moment it's just not perfect. The music seemed to work really well especially in F-Zero and I'm telling you if you like the F-Zero soundtrack originally then listening to this new one with CD quality audio it's another world.
I know there's a whole bunch of people out there that saw this cartridge and went oh boy I'm going to be able to plug this up to my Retron 5 and play every Super Nintendo game ever made. But it doesn't work like that. This thing does not work on the Retron 5 and the reason is that while the Retron 5 is really good at sucking all the information from a cartridge and putting it into the RAM it's not good at using the built-in hardware of the actual cartridge itself. And this cartridge has an additional piece of hardware that's an SD card that the RAM on the Retron 5 simply can't read. So unfortunately where you could run the internals of this cartridge you wouldn't be able to play any of the ROMs so you just kind of have a blank menu to look at. But on clone systems like the Retro Duo and the Retro Trio yeah this works perfectly fine. It works just like it's on a real Super Nintendo so if you have one of those and you can get this you'll be good to go. But I would still recommend a real Super Nintendo over a clone system just because well you're trying to get the most authentic kind of experience and sometimes clone systems might have issues like clock speeds that are a little bit different that could really negatively impact the way you play certain games. But speaking from experience using this on a real Super Nintendo the gameplay, everything about the games and the speed it all runs exactly like the original games. And unlike certain emulations that run a little bit faster or a little bit slower you don't have to worry about anything when playing games on this cartridge.
The SD2SNES is a pretty solid cartridge and although the price can be pretty expensive I do recommend it. There is a huge library of SNES games out there that will run with this cartridge and well it kind of is a lot cheaper than going out and getting all the cartridges yourself. I'm not one to promote piracy but traditionally there are games that simply have never been reissued, never been released in some cases or just weren't released in certain regions and that kind of sucks. With this cartridge it unlocks an entire world of Super Nintendo games and in some cases ROMs and hacks and additional features that people have put into these games over time online that you can only run with cartridges like this or by just taking older cartridges and kind of flashing the memory on them. With this you're just dumping ROMs onto an SD card throwing it on the cartridge and putting it on your real Super Nintendo. It doesn't get much easier than this. There are tons of ways to get cartridges like this but this one is my personal favorite. So if you can get this one I highly recommend it. It's definitely worth the money.
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