hey everybody its lon Seidman and I got my Sega Genesis out once again because we just got in a new flash cartridge from Crick’s this is the mega ever drive pro and what this lets you do is load up a bunch of games on an SD card and play them on your original Sega hardware and what’s cool about this new flash cartridge is that it also can replicate the Sega CD so you can play Sega CD games on the cartridge without the need for a Sega CD unit and we’re going to be taking a closer look at this device and what it can do here in just a second but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that this came in free of charge from Crick’s however all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor is anyone reviewing or approving what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this cartridge is all about so let’s take a closer look now at the hardware it is just a basic cartridge device that pops right into your Sega Genesis as any cartridge would it is compatible with the original Sega Hardware like we’ve got here it also works with the awesome analog Mega SG that we reviewed about a year ago that’s an FPGA based replica of the original Sega Hardware and all of this stuff works with it just as well as it does on the original now what’s cool about these cartridges is that they give you the ability to play the complete Mega Drive and Genesis library on your device irrespective of what region it came from it also supports Master System games because the Sega Genesis was backwards compatible with the Sega Master System as well and of course this cartridge adds in the ability to play the Sega CD stuff now we also have to mention something we looked at not all that long ago which is the Terra Onion mega SD this is a competing device and it does a lot of the same things and as we work our way through the review I’ll talk about some of the things that the Mega everdrive does differently now
it’s important to note that any features that are different between these two devices now may not be different in the future as software updates can come down to change how the devices operate both can take firmware updates and I’m sure we’ll see a bunch on the mega ever drive pro as its life cycle develops now the too long didn’t read on this video is that if you have a mega SD now I think you’ll be perfectly happy sticking with it but if you don’t have a mega SD now the mega ever drive pro might be worth considering given that it costs less and that’s something that might compel some people to go to the mega ever drive there’s about a 50 dollar price difference between the two with the mega ever drive coming in at around $200 and the mega SD selling for about 250 now as far as the physical hardware is concerned the mega ever drive pro is smaller than the mega SD physically not that that makes much of a difference because they both fit into the console without issues I do think they did a better job here on the SD card slot it’s easier to get the card in and out of it versus the mega SD you also get a USB port here for doing development work so you can connect your computer up to the cartridge and feed new builds of your game to the console more efficiently than having to take the card out every time so that might be a bonus for development folks out there this button here is used to pause games when you’re playing Master System titles the old master system required you to get up and actually push a button on the console to get the pause going and that is replicated here with the
cartridge now before we boot up my Sega Genesis here I did want to talk about the setup we’re using today I’m using something called a retro tank 2x right here to get the video captured into my video system this is a line doubler and what it does is it takes analog signals from old game consoles and other devices including like VCRs and it will convert that video to 480p which will work great on most modern displays in fact if you use a retro tank device like this one these old consoles will look better than they would if they were plugged directly into your television just because this thing processes the video in such a way that reduces lag and gives you a very very nice output in fact the device itself doesn’t add any lag at all now connected to the retro tank is an HD retro vision cable that plugs into the back of my Sega Genesis here one of the things that I love about the Sega Genesis is that it will output RGB without any modifications and this will give you the best image quality for a modern TV or captured device these cables aren’t cheap but they do deliver some really spectacular results but again you could use the composite input as well and it would still look pretty decent I did a review of this whole setup here a while back which I’ll link to down below in the video description all right without further ado let’s boot this thing up and see what happens it actually boots up very quickly if you have the model 2 like I have you’ll get that licensing menu there and then you’ll be brought to the main menu one thing to just remind you about is that this really requires original Sega hardware or something that is super compatible with original Sega hardware like the Mega SG most of the clone consoles out there won’t work with this you’ll need to do some research to make sure that this is compatible with a console that you might have but again if you got the Mega SG or the original Sega Hardware you are good to go now before I started shooting I loaded up some games here in the games folder they also have you download a folder here called mega which is the software that the cartridge runs to get all of its stuff going but you’ll want to keep your games in the games folder here I’m just gonna jump into my demo folder real quick and I’ve got a couple of cartridges already set to go here so one of the ones that I like to test is Sonic the Hedgehog 3 which was a later release in the genesis library and I can just go here and hit start and that will bring us right into the game I couldn’t even bring the sound up here if you want to hear some audio from the Sega there we go all is good and we can start playing the game and have at it pretty cool stuff you can see also that it retained my save game so if you have games like this one that support saves it will save it to the cards backup RAM and then it will write it back out to the card as well so you’ll have a backup essentially always at the ready and you can see just how quickly everything came up here and that is pretty much it now when you’re playing a Sega Genesis game like this you can bring up an on-screen menu by default it is that down and start and that will give you some options that
you can pursue while you’re in the game so for example I could set a save state and what this is is something that will save the position of the game when you execute it and you have a hundred different save slots here that you can use for those save States so you can really do a lot of different portions of the game that you can pretty much take a snapshot of as you go here I already have one here at position 0 so if I go over here to load State that will drop me off to that spot in the game where I last saved and here I kind of saved it right before a boss battle just in case I died there’s a lot of controversy about the use of save States of course so if you don’t agree with them don’t use them but you have that as an option and as you can see here I can just load that state again and go right back to where I left off also in here is a cheat menu and you can set cheats that will basically replicate what you might remember from the game genie and what’s also neat about this and this is something that the mega SD also does is that it will remember the cheats that you enter so you don’t have to put them in every time and then you can choose to have them on or off here in the menu which can be really helpful there beyond that you can reset the game or exit the game to go back to the main menu now if we wanted to load up a Master System game that is just as easy I can just select fantasy star here for example and hit start game and that will bring us into the Sega BIOS screen initially here and then over to the game to get started and that’s just how easy it is to switch between the old that console and the 16-bit one now one thing the mega everdrive does now with Sega Master System
cartridges that the mega SD does not do but probably will do in the near future is that you can bring up a menu within the Master System games right now I’ve got mine set to down B and C and as you can see here I can do savestates load States I’ve got 99 save States here for the game and I can pretty much do everything I can do in a Genesis game with this on-screen menu on the Master System side as well and again that’s something that is not in the mega SD at the moment now on the Mega SG the Master System in-game menu does not appear to work there is a very helpful documentation file on Chris’s website where he’s got a bunch of limitations that you might see on some versions of the Genesis hardware as well and I would definitely suggest you take a look at this document prior to purchasing just to make sure all of your expectations will be met now of course the big new feature on the mega everdrive Pro is its Sega CD support prior versions of the mega ever drive did not support the CD and like the mega SD it’ll run the Sega CD games through the cartridge itself which i think is totally awesome given that the original Sega CD had to be plugged into the side of the console now in order to get the CD games to work you do need to load up BIOS files on your SD card I have a US BIOS and a Japanese BIOS on here and depending on the game the cartridge will figure out which BIOS to load for going to go here and load Sonic CD the US version and we’ll just go here to start game and what will happen here is it will boot up the US BIOS because it knows it’s a u.s.
game I’ll hit start here to get things going and this very familiar sound and Sonic graphic here will appear and within a few seconds the game will have booted up and we’ll be able to not only hear the CD audio here but also see the graphics and we can get going with the Sega CD game but on a single cartridge which i think is great and these will certainly load a little slower than they would off of a cartridge image because it is basically replicating how a CV would be read and as you can see here the sound is great you may not like the US version sound but this was the one I remembered the most and all seems to be working quite well here without a hitch let’s take a look at another game now you can’t appreciate 90s cd-rom video gaming without playing a few of these awful full motion video games this one is tommcatt alley the good news is is that these games will run fine off the cartridge here and as you can see the video looks just as lousy as it did 20-something years ago all right here is Batman Returns and I like to run this one just because it uses a lot of the hardware scaling that the Sega CD added to the mix the Sega CD itself was kind of like a separate console because it added a second processor and again some of these Hardware scaling effects that were not available on the original Sega Genesis and as you can see here everything is working just fine all right now one thing to note when you’re in Sega CD mode is that you don’t get an on-screen menu you also don’t get save States due to the complexity of how all of this works now additionally the Sega 32x CD titles are not compatible with the mega ever drive pro because it connects through the cartridge slot I believe the mega SD here had an adapter that allowed you to plug it into the side so that you could get those 32x CD games to load but the mega ever drive pro at the moment any rate only works with the 16-bit games and not the 32-bit 32x titles now the only gotcha with this
cartridge versus the mega SD is that the mega ever drive Pro is a little more finicky when it comes to CD image formats and let me give you an example I wanted to show how the cartridge in this review can differentiate between a Japanese title and an American title by loading the right BIOS and I’ve got a copy of Sonic the Hedgehog CD from Japan and if I go into it here you can see the rip that I’ve got has multiple tracks it’s not just a single bin file it’s got a bunch of bin files and what I figured I would do is go to track 1 and load the game but as you can see here it gets confused and doesn’t know what to do with it I had a few other titles that were ripped in a way that was not just the standard bin queue format and those titles didn’t load either so the games are compatible but the CD format was not what the mega everdrive Pro was looking for now in comparison the mega SD has been able to load up every image that I have in my repertoire without any issues this one again is a little bit more specific about what it wants so what I did to solve this problem was I burned that image back to a CD with IMG burn on Windows and then after the CD was burned irie ripped it with IMG burned and then I was able to get those files delivered down to a single bin file along with its associated cue file and now I can load it up and get playing here and I can even turn on the audio here in a second once the BIOS goes through I know you can see here too that it loaded up the
Japanese BIOS correctly because it was a Japanese game and will let this thing do its thing and sure enough we will get Sonic the Hedgehog loaded up here after a little bit of extra work to get the right format for the cartridge complete with the separate Japanese soundtrack here so just keep in mind that you might have to rear if some of your CD images especially if you’ve got those multi file images or a format that the cartridge doesn’t like that could be one area that Crick’s improves with a future firmware update but at the moment you’ll need to do a little bit of work on some of those CD images that are not compatible one thing that I did notice though is that you can use cheats with the CD titles again you don’t get the savestates or anything else like that but you can put the game genie codes in here and these will behave the same as they would on a cartridge in that it will save the code and you can decide to activate it or deactivate it in future runs of the game now I’m going to attach my 32x in a second but I did want to load up Virtua racing which was a game on the Sega Genesis that had its own coprocessor on the cartridge and as you can see here that coprocessor is running on the mega ever drive pros fpga and you’re getting all of the
rudimentary 3d graphics that cartridge provided here with the mega everdrive this also by the way works on the mega SD alright so now we’ve got the Sega 32x attached as you can see here and we’re going to load up the Star Wars arcade game that I bought with my 32x way back in the day they were liquidating stuff I got a great deal on my 32x back in 97 or 98 you can put cheats in here for these 32x games if you want so that’s an option that you can pursue or you can just load the game now remember you can’t play the 32x CD titles but the 32x games will run fine provided you have a 32x attached the mega SD will also play 32x games and we can just jump right in here and start playing so all is good on the 32x front now when the 32x is attached there are some limitations and these limitations exist both on the mega everdrive Pro and the mega SD so the first one is that you can’t run any of the Master System games when the cartridge is on the 32x here as you can see and the 16-bit CD titles also will not run so if I try to load this game up here you can see that it’s telling me the 32x is attached but you can play regular Sega Genesis and Mega Drive games when the 32x is attached here so there are some things you can do but you don’t get the in-game menu when the 32x is attached and you’re playing Mega Drive games now there’s one more library of games that this cartridge provides support for and that is the NES yes the Nintendo NES you can load up your NES rom files on the cartridge here and it will load them there’s an actual NES core running on the cartridge right now so it is essentially a Nintendo
Entertainment System in a cartridge and as you can see here some of the earlier games worked fine like Super Mario Brothers but take a look at Super Mario Brothers 3 that has a lot of mappers and other stuff that it uses you can see the screen is kind of jumping around a bit you’ll also see some other graphical glitches here so it’s not going to be perfect NES emulation here by any stretch is this kind of a g-wiz feature that they were to add I just think it’s really cool that it even works at all and who knows if we’ll see more improvements to this but I did think it was kind of a fun party trick that you can surprise your friends with when they come over all right now I want to jump through a few of the options and other neat little features that I found on the cartridge that are of note we’re gonna browse into the mega folder here and go to saves and if you go to this folder called SMD snap this is the save state folder for the safe states that we’ve been creating as we’ve been playing games and earlier we had that one from Sonic the Hedgehog you can see the file name here and if I go to preview I get an actual image
of what was happening in the game at the time that I took the save state I thought that was really neat just to see what is there what would be really cool is if I could load the game up from the file I can’t do that at the moment but you can at least look at what the image was on-screen when that state was saved which I thought was pretty neat now to get to the configuration options you hit the C button on your controller and that will pull up your main menu so the first thing that I often go to is the recently played menu here because this is a way to get back to the game you were last playing very quickly keeps a pretty long list of what you were working on there you can also access the cheats here as well this will apply to the most recently loaded ROM so it’s probably easier to go to the game and select the cheat menu but you can do it there if you just want to run the mega-cd bios on its own you can do that right over here by clicking run mega-cd this will give you some device info about what you’ve got installed they also have some nice diagnostic tests here too which checks out all of the different components of the card it’ll even do a speed test of your SD card that’s in there as well so that’s pretty cool if we go over to options here you can see some of the other things that you can configure so you can decide whether or not to have the in-game menu on mega key is
something unique to Crixus cartridges this is a way to bypass some of the regen locks on the games that you might want to play you can disable cheats globally here just by turning them off you have the option to use a Sega Master System bios you can switch it off if you don’t need it you do have to download that bios though and put it on the SD card the SMS ym 2 4 1-3 was an FM synthesis chip that was on the Japanese version of the Sega Master System what’s really neat is that although it did not appear on the US Master System a lot of the games that you got in the US had that FM audio embedded the system just didn’t have the chip to play back the audio if you enable this games that support it will sound very different and it’s kind of cool to hear your favorite old games with a different sound chip so that’s something you could work on reset to menu means that the system will reset to the cartridge menu when you hit the reset button if you turn this off I believe it will load the last game that you had in the system file sorting is pretty self-explanatory warnings is self-explanatory mega-cd options here will allow you to set some of the CD audio settings here one of the things that I turned on that was on that was off by default was the per game Ram cart and what this will do is save a separate file for every CD
game that you load on your cartridge here that’s a feature also on the mega SD but it’s a way to kind of separate all your savegame files into their own unique buckets so that might be something you might want to turn on hide cue files just hides the cue file that you’re browsing in the folder there in game combo allows you to set the different combos for pulling up the in-game menu you can also save combos for doing save States and loads so for example I have a save state of down B and C so if I hit down B and C at the same time on the controller it will save a state I could then configure my quick load to be up B and C and that will lock in and now when I’m in my cartridge games I can very quickly load and save States if I want so that’s kind of a neat little thing there are TC setup is just the real-time clock that’s on the cartridge and you can set your time in there with that and a couple of other little odds and ends here of interest on the ROM here for you run it you can get some more info on the ROM itself the region the size the date all that good stuff you can also look at its hexadecimal data here so you can dive into the ROM file itself and kind of see what it’s doing when it loads itself up so that might be kind of fun to play around with a bit there one other thing that’s really cool is that if you take a bunch of cheat codes like I’ve got here and make a text file you can speed up the entry of those cheat codes so what I did here is I loaded up the sonic the hedghog ROM and
then backed out of it and then if I go here to Sonic txt because it has a txt extension I can load these cheats into the Sonic the Hedgehog game without having to type them in with the controller so I thought that was really useful and I could decide to turn them on or off here as needed so that’s a cool little feature and I can choose to apply those cheats here and they’ll be good to go and then if I don’t want that file on my SD card anymore I can go down to delete here and get rid of it so that’s gonna do it for this look at the mega everdrive Pro another solid offering from Crick’s very good integration with the Sega CD here and I still think it’s magic that you can get the CD games running through the cartridge slot I don’t know how these guys do this and you might be wondering which of these two is better after watching this entire review and it’s hard to say because to be honest with you they both for the most part give you the same experience there are some things that the mega everdrive Pro does a little better it does load some of the cartridge games a little quicker so if you want to save a few seconds here in there this is probably the better way to go you get the save States for the Sega Master System on compatible hardware that’s a nice addition it also has more save state slots than the mega SD does at
the moment you get the NES core of course and then if you are a developer you’ve got the USB port on here my only gripe at the moment with this though is that it’s not as flexible with the CD images so if you have a multi file CD image at the moment it doesn’t load it up you have to reimage it to get it to be compatible again that’s something that the mega SD doesn’t struggle with but this one is a lot less expensive you’re going to pay about 50 or $60 less for this then you’ll pay for this and get very similar functionality between the two of them ultimately competition is good even in a very niche market like flash cartridges for the Sega Genesis and I’m very happy to see all of this development for this system because this was one of my favorite game systems when I was a kid and it’s awesome to still be exploring and getting new things for it 30 years later as a middle aged man this is good stuff and I’m very excited to have both of these things in the marketplace and like I said if you got this already you don’t need this but if you’re in the market this is probably the better buy because it’s less expensive that’s gonna do it for now until next time this is line Simon thanks for watching this channel was brought to you by the lon TV supporters including gold level supporters Tom Albrecht Chris ala Greta David Hawkman Brian Parker Mike Patterson and Bill Pomerance if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to LAN TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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