No further comment on the Japan situation. It’s over, get a system elsewhere.
First, some rambling thoughts on the exotic new system I own.
I bought a different PC Engine Duo and I’ve been dinking around with CDRs this week. It’ll read anything but there’s a bunch of bad rips out there. Some so bad the laser will get stuck in the outermost position. I think just about everything mechanical has been taken out and cleaned at some point because it was jamming. Tonight it was the magnetic ring in the cd tray lid.
Getting a power supply is a total pain in the ass, but it works fine with a 15V Toshiba laptop supply that will run you ~$10 shipped. 3283U seems to be the cheapest one. If 15V makes you nervous, it also works fine with a 9V 2A wall wart plugged into a 5.5mm to 6.3mm adapter. The voltage regulator inside the system is rated to 24V, 15V was fine for the week I used it. A 9V 1A supply will boot but not get a CD at full speed.
So, with the Everdrive plugged in, there is no way to get it to boot to a CD. I tried every button combination while turning the system on. The truly lazy could run CD bios off the Everdrive, and then load a CD. That method works fine.
After market AV cables meant for a SEGA Genesis 1 or master system will shave an inch off the width of the console. You’ll have to use a headphone to RCA cable to get stereo sound. Your volume pot on the headphone jack is probably bad, but the system goes full volume if that pot is bad/missing.
The Hyperkin repro controller feels great and very similar to a real controller. The 10 foot cord corrects a grave offense on the originals with their four foot cords. Unfortunately you have to use a dongle to convert it from TG16 to PCE. Original controllers are incredibly expensive.
And dongles are sadly the name of the game with this system. Dongles everywhere. The system is unbelievably wide with the AV cable plugged in.
No spring on the CD tray door. Games don’t care if you open the tray in the middle of them. That’s occasionally gotten a locked up game playing again. Red book audio seems to just stop after about 20 minutes if the track doesn’t change. Then it’ll start right back up with no problems when you go to the next level.
I’m still waiting on yet another dongle - a multi tap for 2 player games.
According to forums much like this one, any and every problem is solved with a cap kit. My caps look fine so I’m not touching them for now. There’s 56, btw.
Okay, the Everdrive. Very no frills. Hit select to play the last game you loaded. Otherwise navigate to the rom and hit run. Loads everything but SF2 instantly. Shame they didn’t let you remap I and II to roundhouse and fierce, so you have to toggle between punch and kick constantly. It’s a good port but so were SNES and Genesis.
I have to admit, circa 2005 emulation of this system isn’t great. The games play much better on original hardware. I was genuinely surprised by this. Maybe more modern emulators are better.
Cartridge came with an SD card loaded with games.