Rejoice! A while ago I made an article pointing out how the Evercade lineup was a great series of products I like a lot (and have been reviewing a lot of cartridges since then), but was bummed by a recent string of cartridge bricks I stumbled into, along with a dead EXP. I noted the history of the platform’s odd security checks and how there was a private struggle against piracy that had a lot to do with why Blaze was so careful to begin with… And as a funny aside, one of the people I was alluding to as part of a certain community of people being toxic about it, shared my article on twitter completely missing the fact I was dunking on him and his group, expressing concerns I’d be “censored” by Blaze for “speaking the truth.”

Well no “censorship” (i’m not a chud who uses that word to describe companies that don’t like my stuff anyhow) here, as they definitely listened and were made aware of the feedback of me and many others… For my old bricked cartridges were revived!

Yes. Both of my carts, fully bricked to the point they wouldn’t read on any device, were revived WITH saves intact! This is just outstanding, and sure enough they worked on the update-less Super Pocket, so it wasn’t just a thing they did to the OS only on updated hardware. They work fine now even on older firmware and devices!

So how the heck did this happen? Is this flawless or is there room for improvement? Did Blaze listen to me specifically or have this planned for a while? Let’s speculate a bit, as I plan to just really gush about the good and bad about this, since there are still a few lingering concerns I have here, but I certainly feel way better now that I have my 5hr save back than I did before.

First, the “group” idea on types of brick carts I proposed last time; reactions from the discord/facebook groups are a bit mixed, indicating a lot of people who had newer cartridges with the fully dead, unmountable issues (Group C) are able to get their carts up and running again (unless it’s an older title) with this update! Indeed, I got mine restored by turning on my updated EXP with the bricked duke/IH3 inside, and they were good as new once again. I’ve seen a couple of people noting their carts with Group A problems (one game faulty) are starting to work again too, but some aren’t so lucky, and it seems to depend on the cartridge. At the moment I haven’t found much reports of Group B (general corruption/missing artwork) at all yet, so it does seem like whatever issues we did have were a small percent of the EC userbase; the good news is though the carts that were bricked, seem to be getting unbricked due to this update, save for again, some very old cartridges.

But whatever Blaze is doing to fix the bricks, it worked, and it shows to me that once again they do care about their QC; my guess on what happened with the carts is something with a save/file name got messed up during normal use, and it makes the systems freak out when they try reading said cartridge again. My estimated guess on what this new update does is that it just… fixes the error when loading and makes it continue to work good as new. That sort of fix means these carts should continue to last for a very long time, which is outstanding! But why wouldn’t they just fix all the carts, and why do some still seem to be reporting problems/no fix?

Well, it seems to me that it really just depends on the age of the cart; my guess is as EC evolved, newer carts structured their games/files differently, thus meaning corruption has a different chance of happening on older carts vs newer ones. I almost never heard of older, first year carts having the issues the newer ones had for instance, so this would make sense. On the other hand, one of the carts I heard got fixed up was an Atari Lynx 2 Cartridge, which was very early on, so I may just be totally wrong or it depends on the manufacturing date of a batch rather than the release date of the cart. Perhaps later printings are fixable but earlier ones need more work?

Still, the big factor for me comes from how Blaze noted it in their update log; they didn’t scream “THIS IS THE ULTIMATE BRICK FIX” or anything, just noted it as a “cart stability improvement“. To be fair, I’d say that’s an accurate assessment, as it greatly improved and fixed a lot of issues, but a few still seem to linger; I’d not be shocked if this was just Blaze testing the waters to find out more on what went wrong exactly to prevent it from showing up in the future, along with making sure they pushed out a patch they know wouldn’t make the situation worse. All in all, I say this is an excellent first step, and hopefully future patches reduce the issue to a zero or near-zero issue. I can definitely recommend getting evercade carts a lot more now, especially when paired up with an Evercade VS; the EXP is still iffy to me though, and with the EXP-R delayed, hopefully the release of that will make the EXP-R less problematic with the battery issues than the original EXP. (which obviously, a dead battery can’t be revived via a patch, you gotta find a way to replace that yourself)