i've been wanting to get an n64 again lately, and i see that repros have allowed us to play a lot of the games that were ass expensive even two years ago does anyone have experience with saving on 64 reproduction carts reliably? would there be any difference in the cart's ability to hold saves? i don't know if 64 carts used the old fashioned battery or wrote to some kind of flashrom or something, but i presume the hardware in these repros aren't nearly as good as the OEM nintendo carts, or am i wrong? thanks guys
I've never used a reproduction cartridge, so I don't know, but I have the Everdrive 64 flash cartridge (version 2.0 in my case), and it saves and loads everything fine in my experience. Games that save to the controller pak still save to the controller pak, but games that should save to the game cartridge (such as most Nintendo or Rare games) instead save to the SD card that you've inserted into the ED64. And of course you can easily copy the gamesaves to/from your SD card and your PC. The Everdrive 64 has an internal database that tells it what games use what type of gamesaves, but of course it can't know what to use for new N64 games (such as game mods, or leaked unreleased games, etc), so the ED64 automatically reads a txt file from the SD card, which you can edit to add new game data. The data for known N64 games that the ED64 doesn't automatically know is available here: https://krikzz.com/forum/index.php?topic=6126 https://krikzz.com/store/ There are other N64 flash cartridges, such as the 64Drive, but I've only ever used the Everdrive 64, and it's really good, as it can play any N64 game of any region (being able to play NTSC and JAP games on my PAL N64 is fantastic!), plus it allows you to play modded N64 games*, it emulates the gameshark cheat add-on, and it means you don't need to keep a stack of N64 cartridges near your N64, you can leave them stored away somewhere, and just keep the ED64 inserted into the N64, *i.e. English translations of Japanese-only games, or games that have been altered to have new weapons or levels, etc. For a good but not exhaustive list, see: http://krikzz.com/forum/index.php?topic=6134.0 Note though that many Super Mario 64 mods and a lot of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or Zelda: Majora's Mask mods won't work. This isn't because of the Everdrive 64, it's because the mods themselves won't work on a real N64, so no flash cartridge will ever get them working on a real console.
Some of the early ones were really bad - unstable, lacking save functions, etc. The more recent designs work fine - but since this is a grey market with no real quality control it's hard to know what you're going to get until you actually get it, so make sure if you do order any of this stuff it's either coming from a supplier who has good references or from somewhere that has good return policies. In some cases, the games have been patched to use a different save method from the one used on the original cart - this shouldn't cause any problems if it's done correctly.
