They announced the rest of their 2023 cartridge lineup:
- Full Void
- Home Computer Heroes Collection 1
- Goodboy Galaxy / Witch n Wiz dual cart
- Demons of Asteborg / Astebros dual cart
Listings for most of the carts are up on https://evercade.co.uk/cartridges/ now
I didn’t realise how many carts were now out for the Evercade. Personally I’m happy with emulating on my Steam Deck, but fair play to them for making this work in this age.
Yeah, it’s not for everyone a lot of folks prefer emulation on steam decks, anbernics, retroids, pis, etc.
The things that drew me to Evercade are:
- Licensed emulation. Lots of folks don’t care about this, but I’m happy to pay for my media when I can. In cases of indie/homebrew releases, devs get paid which is great. In cases of retro releases, rightsholders get paid which is sometimes just someone with a piece of paper saying they own a particular IP. Which is maybe less important than paying the people who directly made a thing, but in the way our society is structured, imo it’s also important to pay people willing to keep something commercially available as long as they aren’t trying to gouge you.
- Curated library. I mean, part of this is just because not everyone will license to Blaze so they need to pick and choose. But back in college when my roommates and I built a mame machine, or later when I was emulating on a raspberry pi. I would mostly play the same handful of games over and over again. I love that I hadn’t heard of like 70% of the Evercade library and hadn’t played like 80% of games in the library until they came out on carts. So much discovery. I also love the fact that not all the games are all-time greats - average and below average games deserve a chance to be preserved, played, and loved as well.
- The community. I probably should have listed this first because I’m not sure if I would have gotten as into Evercade if it weren’t for the community. The folks in the discord are great. Lots of really chill and knowledgeable folks to chat games with, a few colorful characters to keep things interesting, and Blaze themselves are pretty active and transparent in the chat which is really great to see. There’s a weekly games challenge (often but not always high score related) that one of the moderators runs that has lots of us playing the same games at the same time which is always fun.
Anyway, definitely no judgement for you wanting to enjoy games the way you want - that you are enjoying them at all is the important part. Just wanted to share a little bit about how Evercade works for me for folks who may be curious.
Oh, I totally feel you on that stuff. It is nice that the OG rights holders get a bag for licensing to them, Antstream also seems good for this. And I accept that all my ROMs and disc images are illegal.
The reason I stick with emulation is that the retro bug comes and goes with me. I’ll have the urge to play some Mega Drive, N64, Playstation Games for a night. Then I’m done for a month and back to playing new titles.