I'm looking at an SNES flashcart, and these 2 are the best of the best available.  I know the main differences that the Super Everdrive needs to have the DSP-1 placed in separately, but I'm looking to hear from you guys on your experience with either or both and what would be better to choose.

Is the saving aspect in the Powerpak a real issue or is it easy?  I like the Everdrive's quick saving.

sd2snes is the best by far. Although you'll have to buy one from somebody who has one as orders were filled for the next batch not too long ago. It supports a decent number of mappers [See site below] and doesn't need to have them implanted. SNES powerpak also uses DSP implant chips. [AKA Gutted from original games] Plus, you also get the MSU-1, the new homebrew mapper to stream video and 22Khz sound.

http://sd2snes.de/blog/status

The saving aspect of the snes powerpak isnt too bad at all. Its a minor minor inconvience in the big scheme of things.

Well I don't mess with saving that much unless I'm playing a RPG that I don't have which is easy to create. But having to create a save per game is too much of a pain for me. With the Everdrive you have the game loading issues whereas the PowerPak is near instant. Not sure about that other one posted...

yes i would much rather take the fast load time than the save. Even though the snes powerpak dose save. So in reallity you get the best of both worlds.

Scott

It said something about a wide March cart release, I might wait for that

SNES PowerPak has faster random game loading, bigger memory, but more clumsy saves handling. Super Everdrive has faster previous game loading. In actual use they will be pretty similar, but of course the PowerPak is far better sd2snes will be the ultimate cart and will also be around twice the price. Might be worth waiting for anyways!

That one running chipped stuff is the good one in my book. I avoid the others due to lacking that.

If I ordered would there be any chance of getting it into a regular SNES cart?  The red one bugs me for some reason

Bunnys powerpak should fit into it's own cart. Maybe you could do a custom request to just have him ship a cart and a label?

And I just checked, the sd2snes will be 120EUR (+Shipping). Which is about $160 USD+Shipping, not too much. And I just checked on NESDevs topic and while the main creator hasn't said anything, on there and the official site it seems like StoneAgeGamer is taking over the production job so it may be back in stock soon.

Good luck with which ever you get, none are terrible, sd2snes is just full of nice mappers support with no sacrifices which is why I believe it to be the top one. Plus it has a nice menu. But they're all 3 pretty good flash carts.

I like the fact that most of the mappers are supported and he's working on SFX right now. An extra 40-50$ but having all of the mappers seems like an easy pick.

There's still some that aren't supported, so watch out. But for S-DD1 there's the patch to decompress the graphics separate that it'll run, but yes it does have a lot of mappers. All the DSP's, Cx4, working on SFX. All of those are used in good games, hopefully he gets SFX done.

dose the sd2snes have the game genie thing going on.
I like that on my nes powerpak.


Scott

It's missing one critical chip though, the SA-1 that does Kirby's Dreamland 3, Kirby's Star Stacker, and Super Mario RPG notably but there are a few others too.

And no other flash cart has those either. The other two can't do Capcom games with the Cx4, oh well, it's still not perfect but it's better than all others.

Aaron, can someone else say something to say without you commenting?

?

Heh, okay.

Not yet according to their status page

Watch out, 3gen can program in braille.

It's a lost art... Only few still possess enough skill....

Seriously though the powerpak is the best.  It uses compact flash for superior speed.  It uses a ram chip instead of flash memory to play the game meaning more memory capacity and the ram chips last much longer than flash memory.  It comes in its own cool red case!  Really the only thing that is somewhat annoying is having to hold reset for 5 seconds otherwise you lose your save data but from a hardware standpoint the powerpak is EASILY the most bang for your buck.

Really sd2snes will have the advantage of playing a few extra games that use special chips?  I hope they don't fpga the superfx chip.  My only complaint about the nes powerpak is that the reproduction of advanced audio chips doesn't match the real hardware which I imagine would be the same with a fpga superfx chip.  For anything that uses audio or video hardware upgrades I prefer to use the real cart.  Memory mappers I don't mind using fpga.

The reason the audio on the nes powerpak isn't exactly right is that it uses a bit of a hack to reproduce the audio. (pwm to be exact) The superfx doesn't generate any video thats passed trough to the system like audio would on famicom so theres no real need to worry about it being less then perfect (Depending on how much time hte guy making the fpga clone is willing to put into it)

edit: to clarify a bit more on the nes powerpak audio part. The thing was never designed with extra audio support in mind. Loopy managed to get the mappers to do it by using ONE pin on the fpga switching really fast to create different voltage levels. This is just not gonna sound as good as having a full on dac on there doing the digital -> analog conversion.

That's a good sign. Hopefully after SFX he can get the SA-1 to work which would put it far and away ahead of the competition

If he got the US-NTSC region special chips running in that thing I'd pay a good little bit towards one of those flash kits for sure. It's that very failing that kept me off the SNES PowerPak as some of my most favorite games use them so it's pointless for me to bother with.

I'm having some issues with my PowerPak on games that should be supported. Anyone else having any trouble with Zelda A Link to the Past, Super Mario All-Stars and Mega Man X? I've tried at least 5 different versions of each ROM. I have the physical copies sitting on a shelf four feet from my SNES, and the carts work great, but the ability to cram everything (almost) onto one cart is my main motivator for owning an SNES PowerPak and I'm not having much luck with it. My NES PowePak, on the other hand, is kicking some serious butt! I love the thing.

Download the latest update off the site and put it on your card.