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GBAx.com review of the Genesis / Megadrive & 32X / PC Engine / SNES / SMS Flash carts 4/11/04 Manufacturer: Toto-tek This is somthing which could not have came sooner for all us retro fans! Flash carts for the Megadrive/Genesis/SNES/Master system & PC-Engine. I'm going to review the Megadrive one, but they are all essentially the same. The Megadrive carts come in 2 flavours 32M and 64M, the latter also supporting the doomed 32X addon. The SNES one comes in just the 64M size, the Sega Master system & PC engine come as 32M. If you're like me and collect the old games you will probably not like using them incase of damage - I just don't like having the original carts out their boxes at all. So no more worrying about damaging your collected games when playing them, just back them up to this cart instead and begin playing! Firstly MD, SNES, SMS and PCE games are small - so 64M in these terms is massive, you can fit about 10 Roms on at once, only the very last MD & SNES games from the late 1990's began to creep up in size, I found one which was 24M but thankfully most are 1M to 8M. So I hurredly recreated my old Megadrive collection and slammed it into the cart slot and fired the old girl up! Greeted by a nice menu screen I went from game to game on the big screen TV like I was 10 years old again, these games really come to life on the original system! I then sat for a totally geekish 4 hours playing every game I remembered for 5 mins at a time before I remembered another I wanted to play again! So, the cart works, but whats it all like? Well it uses a curious mix of USB and Parallel to operate. The linker gathers its 5v power from the USB port but writes to the cart via the parallel, taking about 3mins to fill a 64M cart - a very respectable speed! The software is very nice and simple - both write & read features, some of the best of its kind i've seen - certain other flash card makers could learn a thing or two from it. Having it work via the parallel means no nasty drivers need to be installed, just plug it in and go. Ah, but what about compatibility issues? Well i've not found anything which won't work or save. Yes - save! The carts suprisingly support saves for the few games which featured them. As for the 32X support, it works fine - nice to see some of the very rare 32X games - and some of them are amazing! You can get back to the cart menu by resetting the system and games can be individually added or removed from the cart, booting is all instant, there is no load time - just like the real thing. One thing i've loved about this is that i've finally been able to play all those late term games which never got a Euro release, some of which i've loved such as DukeNukem 3D on the Megadrive (possibly the most ambitious conversion ever, and it works!), others like Panorama cotton had me wondering what the fuss was all about, the infamous HardWired game demo which has amazed me (smooth FMV & rotation on the MD!), other games from back in the day like Turbo Outrun had me saying alound 'They actually released this crap!?' christ i'm glad I didn't buy some of these when I was a teenager - now i understand why mysteriously some games never saw the light of day in the UK, but some games are so good I can't believe I over looked them! I learnt something very true this week while testing these flash cards - you cannot beat the real, original system for playing the classics on. Everything works perfect, just as it should and on the big screen too. The feel of the 6 button joypad, the perfect sound, the ease of two player fun - memories came flooding back left right and center - this really is a must have for all retrofans, now if you will excuse me i'm off for another game of Devil Crush! You can buy all these flash kits & consoles to go with there here. -Craig - www.gbax.com