Blaze has revealed that its Evercade line of systems will soon benefit from "Giga Carts" – larger cartridges with more storage space.
This new higher storage capacity will pave the way for bigger titles, allowing Blaze to bring modern-day releases to the system.
We've already seen 'native' ports of titles like Cathedral and Full Void, but this new cartridge type will allow for more ambitious releases.
The catch is that this new cart is obviously more expensive to produce, so Giga Cart titles will retail for £22.49 – higher than the typical price of £14.99.
Blaze has confirmed that two Giga Carts will be released this year.
Here's the PR:
Here at Evercade, we’ve always had to strike a balance between bringing great games to you on physical cartridges and ensuring they represent great value to you. As we head into the future, and the scope of what our fans want to play becomes more recent, we’ve adapted to provide this the best way we can.
“Giga Cart” is a new type of cartridge we are making that is designed specifically for larger and more modern or recent retro games, mostly originally released on CD. This new cartridge type will be identical in size and shape to your existing carts but will internally have a larger capacity to bring you these more demanding titles.
We’ve always been honest with our community and they’ve always been honest with us. For us to produce a larger cart would mean a higher development and release cost, and the Evercade community has always been open to this if the reasoning behind it was so that they get more from the collection in the quality of the games provided. We believe we’ve found the right balance with Giga Cart.
Giga Cart Evercade cartridges will have an RRP of £22.49/$24.99/€24.99. This means having more of these games in one cart will have a better value for you than breaking a game list down over multiple cartridges. This change does not affect the current cost of other Evercade cartridges and they will remain at their £17.99/$19.99/€19.99 RRP.
Comments 22
Nice. Got my Evercade Exp today and I love the cartridges. Unlike the Nintendo Switch cartridges, they feel like actual cartridges and not like some micro SD, or something like that.
I am looking forward to the Giga cartridges.
I find this marketing pretty funny. An Evercade cart is just an SD card adapted to a weird pin-out, so this press release amounts too : "We're going to start using bigger SD cards and they cost more." But since the bigger carts have a cute name I somehow feel better about it
@snk2d4life
Yes, but to the human being it just feels better
Just open a NES or SNES module, the former ones have more air than hardware, the snes ones are also only half filled, if the don't use additional chips, battery etc.
Also, it is much nicer to have the Artwork and logos visible on the module, i often like them
@snk2d4life Seriously they just use an SD adapter?
@Poodlestargenerica basically, yes http://retrotechr.blogspot.com/2020/06/evercade.html. For what it's worth, using commodity parts and putting them in a custom shell is exactly the right way to do this from a design perspective. Otherwise consumers would have to pay like £60 for a custom eprom chip or something
@Azuris I agree. I'm not trying to devalue the product; I just find the narrative entertaining
@snk2d4life Yeah, but it really puts into perspective the fact that they could literally just put all the games in one cartridge, right?
@snk2d4life thanx for this, entertaining project (ps you should remove the . from the link)
@Poodlestargenerica Yeah, from a technical standpoint they probably could put all the games on one cartridge
@romanista Thanks! Fixed
Giga cartridge for giga games, nice. Now bring on those 2-3 cd classic psone games like final fantasy 7, lunar silver star story complete, grandia, fear effect 1&2, and others 😃
@Jhena I know right, it's really nice to insert cartridge into evercade exp compared to those itty-bitty switch cartridge. And the manuals rules.
I own every Evercade cart so far and have extracted just the roms. The total size of every game ever is about 2.8GB with the largest SD card being only 512MB.
It does seem a bit odd that they are putting their price up by £4.50 when a high spec 64GB card is only £8. I somehow doubt they will be increasing their size that much since the most they can emulate are PS1 games.
@wiiware
Oh yes, the manuals. It really makes me feel, like purchasing real physical video game media again.
@Jhena. The manuals are ok, but they are very abridged. If they are using bigger SD cards, perhaps they can fill them with supplementary materials such as soundtracks and full PDF manuals.
The problems with these glorified sd cards, is that they can easily be corrupted, by updates etc.
Sure, you can get a replacement from Evercade, but what happens when Blaze ends the Evercade line?
I fear none of the "carts" will survive 10-20 years from now.
@kirby2000
This would be nice. I like to listen to the soundtrack of a game, when I beat it.
They also said that these bigger carts can come with more games, that this is better than releasing several volumes, and I totally agree. They started releasing collections with more titles but they seem to have settled in 6 games per cart. I prefer paying a little more but having 10+ games again.
They're not even real cartridges, but then again since the games and emulators can be patched, they need to be re-writable so they have to be SD cards.
SD cards are so cheap, especially if bought in bulk by companies. One side of me feels like they're being stingy, but then again, apparently Blaze hasn't made a profit off the Evercade line yet, even after 4 years on the market. So I don't blame them, upping the price.
@Chocoburger is that true, never made a profit? I hope that it kinda did but they always reinvest it into the platform rather than selling at a loss. I thought they made some per cart; I seem to recall them putting the profits from the Oliver Twins Collection into the National Videogame Museum, and while it wasn’t a huge sum, it was something (£25k ish I think?). I’d be nervous about the longevity of Evercade if they are burning through debt to finance it…but it seems unlikely? They’ve stayed private so haven’t had to look for investors, and Evercade’s been going and growing for a while. Plus they were pretty success for many years before Evercade.
I’m excited by Giga Carts. It’s great branding (larger carts costing more is lost on consumers on Switch for example, so we get rubbish download only carts). But mostly it exciting to open up PS1/Saturn/PC (maybe even MegaCD?) titles that shipped on discs to collections. There’s plenty of games that wouldn’t need analog sticks on those devices. I saw the Tomb Raider leak. Given they’ve worked with Capcom before, my dream would be OG Resi titles!
@Grackler I read it somewhere, but I can't remember where. It could be an old post or out-dated information by now. Wish I could find the post or article where I read it, but alas!
I hope future cartridges include some of the more obscure survival horror titles from the PS1 era. Also a Jazz Jackrabbit collection. They ported Duke Nukem. Now give me Jazz!
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