A while ago I got my review up for the Superstation One. I noted for months via the site status updates how I was looking forward to it, and how I knew I was ultimately getting a MISTER in a PS1 shell at the end of the day. A bit trickier to handle compared to an Analogue system, but should still be pretty fun, I felt.

Ultimately, I pointed out huge issues with the memory card ports being out of tolerance and just the whole headache of a setup process for newcomers, (MISTER is not at all meant to be user friendly on purpose, and this device seems increasingly to have, for me at least, been made without much of the MISTER community’s preferences in mind) noting that you’d have to have a lot of patience to get this to work well enough, but once it did it was a great showcase of the great open source work the MISTER contributors do.

Well, I guess I spoke a little too soon; my review is still one I stand by overall, and despite an initial reaction in the hours of this problem making me want to lower the score, I still held strong and kept to my site policy of not editing scores after I publish a review. So what could have possibly made me want to lower a score so shortly after publishing a review?

How about your memory card exploding within the SNAC port, and going on a wild goose chase and tests to try and get around a stupid blame game and the fact there is a genuinely real issue here, but also a huge stubbornness to admit it needs fixing? Sit down folks, I got a long ramble ahead, and if you’re having similar issues with your Superstation One’s Memory Card SNAC slot, maybe this will help ya some. And maybe this can shut up some people once and for all who insisted at me it was all a self imposed non issue.

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The Tolerance Issue

I am not a hyper techie guy. I do not own precise measurement tools, nor much tools of my own besides stuff that opens and cleans any system that’s N64 and before. In my review I largely chalked up the issues I had with the memory card slot reported by folks in the know and experienced by myself as a fault with cards that weren’t perfectly matching to OEM spec. Maybe my memory card with plastic damage was the problem, I thought. Maybe the Memcardpro not working was just bad luck and it didn’t get measured right, I thought.

Well, a day after getting the review up on SFG, I decided to try a brand “new” (ie, used, but barely used, since these cards stopped getting made decades ago) OEM card and see if my pickiness issue with my memory card slot was mitigated. I looked at the pins good here; pristine, not dirty in the slightest, and working perfectly fine on my PS2 with wiggle, just like my last card. I note the wiggle, because a dirty card on a PS2 will unmount if the pins are dirty and you wiggle it. This time around, no plastic damage on the card. It should have worked consistently. It should have, if the SNAC slot was like a normal PS1 memory card slot, worked fine.

It didn’t. Same issue as last time; if it was dead center it would mount, but so much as a tap would unmount it and make it beyond impractical to use. So I asked around. Told to clean my card and it was dirty. I really shouldn’t need to with it working fine on the PS2, but I figured I would anyway with the same, usual 91% iso alcohol i’ve used on everything since the dawn of time, including the GBC and A Super Game Boy 2, both with transparent shells. Put the card inside the system. Still didn’t read in the slightest unless it was dead center, and so much as a light tap or breeze would unmount it, or even moving between rooms to swap from HDMI to CRT. Seems bad that this brand new device can’t read a clean card. So I removed the card, and then…

….Yeah, it exploded. Apparently, iso alcohol at a strong concentration weakens the plastic and make it more prone to cracking, which might explain how my other card got that plastic damage. Pardon me for not knowing that, searching on the internet for transparent PS1 cards breaking from pin cleaning won’t bring up many results. Trust me, I looked after the fact. (Google being pretty useless nowadays doesn’t help either)

Anyhow, I had a good chunk of the memory card plastic stuck in the SNAC port, and couldn’t get it out with tweezers or anything I had on record. I was pretty pissed, considering well, I spent $250 on this thing for review and expected it to work consistently and for a long time. The lack of Memcardpro support was a bummer, but a thing I knew going in, so I bought it mainly for my PS2 as a backup if compatibility was ruled out like it eventually was from 8BitMods. I at least thought a real first party memory card would work, but I guess I was foolish for thinking that, especially with plenty of reviews and people within discord servers insisting it was just fine.

Ultimately, what soured me most in this whole ordeal was less the stupidity of my card exploding in the system and not knowing scientific chemical knowledge (my bad), but moreso the fact that I felt like I was repeating myself over and over again that yes, there’s a tolerance difference between this and a real PS1/PS2, actual experts who make memory cards say so. Yes, I can tell because my OEM cards didn’t work on this thing consistently, and yes, they were clean. Stop telling me it’s all on me for noticing your card ports are pickier than a PS2 I have right next to me for comparison.

That’s ultimately, the main gripe I had, and thinking about it the past few days (with me leaving the system at a repair counter as I waited for their PS3/PC repair guy to come and look at getting the plastic out, since it’s ensnared around those pins), I genuinely think the stubbornness of admitting there’s a problem at all is what annoys me the most.

See, when the Memory Card Pro people’s findings were shared on Taki’s Discord, my hoped response would be something along the lines of “that’s unfortunate, our supplier messed up, we’ll either try to fix it in a future batch” or “it’s too late to do much now, but we’re aware of it now and apologize”. I didn’t exactly expect him to go on about how oh, their card was also out of spec, so therefore he didn’t do anything wrong and didn’t need to fix anything. It felt pretty pathetic, honestly.

It didn’t take much more looking around for me to figure out that multiple things are true: yes, both parts are out of spec, but the Memory Card Pro was tested to work and does work on all other memory card slots out there. Yes, even other SNAC ports made for MISTERs. It is pretty shitty that the only one that mostly does not work is the one on the Superstation One, and you’d think that it’d be better form for Taki Udon to fix that, rather than the other way around. I get it’d be a lot of work and a headache, but it sure seems like with that not being the only card causing trouble, it’d be a good idea to tweak the memory card slot to be more in spec so that cards like those OEM ones I used actually worked without being dead center even.

Asking around on reddit, I was curious if I just got a dud port, but as shown in the comments, there are indeed more than just I who had issues with memory cards not reading in the SNAC ports, and not just the MemCardPro. Again, I could live without memcardpro support on this (this has a virtual memory card anyhow, which does an equally good job, and has been what I resorted to post exploding card syndrome), but the lack of consistent reading is a documented, real problem going on here, and we even see some people who do have working memory card pros on this thing; further reinforcing the idea there’s just small enough of a tolerance difference to make that not fully make contact and work. Someone even noted their own testing, which brought the exact same issues as on my unit, tolerance pickiness and all, with multiple memory cards. So I’m not alone! I’d be happy, except this sucks and means the product has a nasty little defect the creator of the product is too anal to even admit is an issue, insisting he tested it with a ton of very real cards and it was accurately measured with a micrometer. Bold claims.

So let’s do our own tests, amateur style! Having taken my Superstation to my nearest game repair place, I was pretty distraught, mainly wanting to save the memory card port without damage and to (hopefully) transplant the internals to a new card shell so I can use it again (thankfully, I backed up the data to the memcard via the PS2 beforehand, in case we couldn’t)

First, my repair pal opened the S1, and luckily that’s the easy part as I noted in my review. SNAC ports are at the top so there’s not much needed to take them off the board outside of ribbon cable headaches. We tried to get the shards out without removing the port, but the sides of the port had a giant wall which made getting it with any kind of plier not at all possible. We needed more focus, more force, but not enough to break it.

While that was going on, I mainly looked at the remains of my old card, and the pins more closely. Repair guy confirmed these pins are clean and if they work on a PS2, it should work in this port, unless the port was bad.

What happened here is the memory card SNAC port here had the shards of my old card ensnared around the pins within; I couldn’t just pull this out and call it a day, I had to somehow get this unsnared without damaging the pins. It was a pretty tough task, but my repair pal was up for it. Some work later, and we finally succeed! Enough careful pushing and touching the pins as much as needed and no more, and that last shard finally freed itself from prison.

Putting everything back together, reconnecting the ribbon cable, and making it all go back as it should, and we had the Superstation back in business. So, how about that card port, and the second slot I completely ignored? Maybe that one was in better working order the entire time, so I should have shuffled them around perhaps. Thus, with the blessing of the store, they gave me every last PS1 memory card in their inventory to throw at both slots. Would the same issue happen? For some cards, or all cards? Well…

See the top set of cards? Most of them had clean pins, some dirty. None of them worked well and all had the exact same issue as my card did, in both slots; Slot 1 wasn’t the issue, it was systemic to both slots as a whole. But those bottom three? Those very notoriously shitty memory cards, especially the infamous 2X one? Believe it or not, they worked. No wiggle issues, no unmounting, nothing. I was bewildered. The 1M memory card in particular was somewhat dirty too, which meant it wasn’t even having issues seeing the contacts, but rather having a tight connection. See, those bottom three, being third party and bad, all were made in a way that made them have a tighter fit within the S1’s memory card slot. I think this may be the crux of the issue, but as an amateur don’t quote me entirely on that. Either way, OEM cards that are clean should not be absurdly picky to result in these kinds of photos.

Yeah. If it was super duper hyper dead center it’d work. But any slight movement? Nope, unmounting. Combine that with a product already pretty bad as a user-friendly experience (since MISTER is not meant to be!) and you have yourself an absolute nightmare of a slot tolerance issue. Nearly every card, no matter if they were from the launch year or the PSOne revision era, all failed in the exact same way. Only the super tight ones work, which made me cynically ponder if Taki’s own cards are gonna be made super tight to work on these to get you to buy his brand, but when others seem to have no issues with their real memory cards (seemingly from earlier batches, mine was from the third one), I don’t think that’s the case.

I think something went wrong with the tolerance process, but it’s such a slight error that it wasn’t on purpose but ended up making a whole bunch of Superstations super picky with slot tolerance. I think the fact most people just use the digital card is how this hasn’t been further reported. Either way, with the Memcard Pro having similar levels of “will this wont this work right”, I think we can safely conclude there’s an actual consistent issue here, and Taki refuses to even acknowledge it as such. That’s a theme that’ll come up later.

…Except there would be one savior that did work and mostly saved the day, albeit with some caveats. Yes, the PS1 multitap! Plugging this into the SNAC controller slot (which works fine, no issues), and anything that plays nice with the multitap will read the memory card fine. Every card thrown at this memory card slot worked with no issues, unlike both the ones on the Superstation. This further reaffirms my testing that the slot tolerance is fucked up and needs adjustment in future batches, and 1:1 comparisons with the slot are needed. Sorry, but your “micron millimeter testing” didn’t clearly work jack all, so you gotta do it again. Some supplier somewhere messed up.

Of course this isn’t a bullet proof fix; the multitap doesn’t work on all PS1 games, and the Memory Card pro can’t use it because it doesn’t get enough juice to work right. But for the ones that it will play nice with, the memory card’s a non issue now, and I was finally able to take it home, and promptly move all these saves to the digital memory cards so I never had to deal with this nightmare ever again.

Ultimately, this whole headache just soured me on the Superstation overall, because I don’t think it’s reasonable for a new thing I spent $250 on to not want to work all that well with one of the key advertised features, and for its creator to just instinctively deflect and blame when asked about it; blaming people’s cards for being dirty (even when they aren’t), blaming the Memory Card Pro people for making their card bad, (even though it works on every other kind of slot out there that isn’t a multitap, yes, they tried.) and refusing in any way, shape or form to admit that hmm, maybe it could have gone a bit better. Just something like that would have at least made me feel like it was a case of “oh shoot, this was unexpected”. As it stands now, it comes off as a guy stubbornly refusing to admit anything was possibly messed up, because he did all sorts of testing and work! Surely there wouldn’t be mistakes made, because clearly testing means there’s no chance of any mistakes. Surely instead of admitting the supplier made an error, you just deflect and blame the people who put their cards in the system for their issues.

This whole ramble is really just a way for me to express how annoyed this situation left me in the end. I’ve covered way too many instances of companies with minor to huge QC errors, and how a common thread in the ones that make me distinctly wary are the ones where the people in charge stubbornly refuse to admit any fault. That to me isn’t just a problem on the manufacturing end; it’s a problem for you as a company and just doing terrible PR overall and how you really should just be better, take the feedback in stride, and even if you cant fix it, at least admit it won’t work out but consider it unfortunate that things work that way. Between Retro Remake and 8BitMods in this situation, I absolutely feel more pain for 8BitMods, since here they are, doing their own research, finding problems, hoping to submit it as feedback, only to essentially get told off as “nuh-uh” and it’s their problem to fix alone. Feedback makes the world go round; it’s a shame some manufacturers don’t see things that way.

So yeah, if you have a memory card and wonder why your SNAC port in your Superstation might not play well with it, even if it’s super duper clean as a whistle; tolerance differences! You could take the advice of someone who sincerely suggested I buy the SuperDock and a $75 PS1 SNAC port (like what you’d buy for a MISTER) for it that will work with the cards consistently, which is such a stupid idea (let’s spend more money to do the thing that should work from the getgo!) and not at all a thing the more casual buyers of this product will ever want to do if they run across this issue. In fact, I’m gonna be directly petty for the first time in an eternity on my site, and say if that discorder sincerely still believes that’s the best solution for memory card slot issues, instead of pushing for Taki to do better, or at least admit some kinda fault, I hope they get a case of bad constipation cramps. I cannot fucking believe the pretzeling you’d need to do in order to suggest such a thing with seriousness.

Maybe you’ll get lucky with your port. Maybe you won’t. Who knows! It’s a roulette, and it’s utterly disappointing what is otherwise a good introduction to MISTER and has good controller SNAC support is muddled by an annoying issue like this.

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…Why even bring this up, isn’t this a MISTER for techies anyway?

Sure, I mentioned earlier how I still knew coming in this was a MISTER, and in the review I noted the growing pains I had getting into this thing, before eventually figuring enough out to be comfortable and falling in love more as I used a SN30 with it. As a DIY product, this sort of thing should be fixable or less of a bother for people who buy this and have the means to get SNAC ports or their own workarounds. (maybe an extender will get made that makes the memcardpro work?) So why would I be this up in arms over an issue that you could still argue, was 100% self inflicted by my reckless iso rubbing? (despite again, the fact the card was spotless beforehand, and post cleaning, it still didn’t read consistently) For the main reason I pointed out about the S1 not being a slam dunk recommendation in my review; this thing is a square peg being shoved into a round hole.

See, to me and a lot of you reading this, you likely already know what a MISTER is. What this was meant to be; a MISTER in a neat little PS1 shell. Unfortunately, due to the initial marketing, and how a lot of gaming sites covered it, there’s a not insignificant part of people who preordered this back in Jan 2025 who genuinely assumed it was akin to the Analogue consoles, especially with the addition of the Dock. A system you can turn on, plug in and play, and throw a disc in and call it a day. After all, it has all the ports, so clearly it wouldn’t be that hard, right?

It also genuinely does not help there were plenty of delays, and a sloppy lack of communication outside of Taki’s Discord server. I shouldn’t have to explain why limiting most communication to a discord server is a stupid and dumb idea, especially when there’s a newsletter signup on their own website, but said newsletter since I signed up in Jan of this year, only sent me the email informing buyers of the dock split to get their system a bit earlier. None of the status updates on the shipping updates page (which could have been automated to just a monthly email noting batch progress), no status updates on the ETA of certain features like Console Mode/Dock Disc Reading, (Yes, the dock doesn’t do its main job of reading discs yet) yeah I can see why there’s a subset of people getting this thing who might not realize what they bought was a MISTER, and how being QR coded to a video tutorial leads you to comments with tons of confused newcomers having no idea what to do and having to watch a 45 minute video of a guy rambling (hey, another one who isn’t me!) as a “quick start” guide.

The other big glaring issue, and the one I thankfully don’t have to suffer myself, comes from the Superdock’s lack of compatibility, and the sheer gaslighting insanity on how poorly communicated it was and how dumb it is to ship out a product where the main feature needs a patch that does not exist to work. I mentioned in my review I planned to review the SuperDock later; no more. I canceled my preorder after this memory card nightmare and the stupid gaslighting I endured trying to explain how the tolerance problem was real to deaf ears over and over again, and shortly after when bundled units started showing up, (no standalone docks exist yet, so I wouldn’t even have mine by now if I kept it) nearly everyone reviewing the unit from then on out highlighted the glaring issue of the dock not being able to read discs.

Cue the stupidest series of gaslights I’ve seen in well, quite a while. Y’know how I said Taki didn’t seem to like hearing feedback? Well it sure seems like Taki doesn’t seem to like seeing youtubers confused why a product they bought didn’t have a main feature working out the box. The common refrain seems to be “well, I didn’t say it would work day one, and I told people via discord it would need an update!” except look here at this part of the website;

And this part.

And also this part.

Yeah, all of these, if I showed em to a rando Bob Nintendo on the street, would insinuate the disc drive would be working and not need a friggin patch to do its job. Try to preorder a Superdock this very minute, and you won’t even see any notice that it needs a patch that isn’t real. This is bad marketing and communication, plain and simple.

So yeah, when a lot of gaming websites treated this like an Analogue PS1, and a lot of more casual, Mister Newbie folk buy it as such, you can see why a lot of people would be pretty annoyed at this. Even moreso if they signed up on the email list like I did, and their only communication was a whopping single email asking you to split a dock shipment if you wish to get your superstation early. Any other status update? Discord. Sure hope you thought ahead before to join a discord! But no worries, there’s a status update page that’s pretty barebones!

Anyhow, buyers should be communicated with on a product in the making. They should not have to be told to run around and fumble to find a creator’s discord server or their X The Everything App page just to get basic status updates, and it was clear from being in that server that Taki didn’t like writing long email updates and thus that seems to be the reason there hardly were to any. A monthly status email would have more than helped and update every buyer on the status of their order, and could have easily been the avenue to remind them that the dock disc drive support would come later. But no, that’d be too hard, and people might not read them, so let’s not even bother to communicate with customers! (This was a real excuse I saw some of his fans give for why monthly status emails were probably not done) Truly pathetic. There appears to be some more emails going out lately on the next Superstation Batch being constantly delayed by part arrivals, so at least there’s more now than there was via the email newsletter in 2025, but good lord, talk about stubbornness.

I think the last bit that makes me the most annoyed of all this here, is just how people in Taki’s circle or fandom excuse these communication issues and tolerance problems. I already went into my venting about being blamed because I used alcohol on a brittle plastic, and then vindicating myself when I tested tons of cards at a store, all with the same issue, and seeing other people prove that I am not alone. And for the Dock not doing the main feature, you’ll sure see a lot of common excuses in the comment section of any youtuber who points out how dumb this is, like “Oh I bought this for the NVME drive! That works fine!”, as if the newcomer buying this as their first MISTER anything would even know what the fuck a NVME even does, or have that be their first thought and priority upon getting the thing and seeing it in person. Sure, that’s a nice bonus. But again, I think the button on the front of the disc drive explains what most people expect this thing to do from the getgo. It not working from the getgo and not even any sort of simple note in the box saying “hey this needs a bit more time, subscribe to the newsletter to get the latest updates” so they don’t have to fumble around the internet would have at least been better.

It truly feels like a group refusing to accept feedback or criticism unless it’s from certain people in high regard in the community, and that just makes a bubble. I’m not the only one to think this dock thing is dumb, and someone else who bought this for review with the dock had to do a lot of online digging just to learn it didn’t work. Case in point; either delay the dock until the disc drive worked, or sent out an email to all dock buyers letting em know the disc support might take a bit. That’s it! That’s all you had to do! And that’s where my mind breaks the most, the sheer lack of accountability, the sheer lack of “yea we could have done that better”, the sheer, absolute stubbornness to never admit fault, almost like a narcissist. Don’t even get me started on learning about the Super7 and all that weird Switch homebrew screen stuff, which not only sounds like a nightmare to make, but also appears to have barely been worked on or communicated to customers, despite preorders for one model of screen having opened up over a year ago. Sure, the Superstation was clearly priority no 1 and is impressive in a lot of ways, but I think entirely ghosting people who bought a completely separate product is a pretty bad example of communication. Yet another continuing theme with this whole line.

Needless to say, the base Superstation will be my last Taki Udon product, and while I made the most of this thing and still cherish this as a MISTER and enjoy the MISTER community and their contributions, I think it’s safe to say he bit off more than he can chew here. As of now, the Disc support still isn’t real. Will it be? Who knows. Maybe it’ll come out in a week. Maybe it’ll come out in a month. Maybe it’ll go MIA like those Super7 OLED thingies I just learned about. Or maybe it’ll go the way of the Analogue DAC; for something as major as Disc Drive support, I still genuinely cannot believe they didn’t hold off on the dock until that was confirmed working; but stubbornness wins, and that sure also explains why the memory card slot’s the way it is and the official response is basically to brush it off as not real or only happening to an insignificant amount of people.

Anyhow, this is probably why reviewers who go off to make their own product and do a lot of things pretty impressively… should maybe also realize they aren’t immune from criticism, no matter how amateurish and silly. And that messaging matters a lot.