You may have long been accustomed to burning a row of ROMs in the card, and you have to read the words to open whichever one you want. But for old consoles, “card stickers” are already part of the experience. In the past, even the cartridges of red and white machines would have beautiful game stickers, so you could tell at a glance what you were playing. The problem is, now everyone uses flash cards to play retro games. Whatever game you play, the sticker on the flash cartridge will be the same.
This pain point that no one seems to care about has actually been solved by someone.
Mod player David “DAVIDXGAMESmx” Brito made an N64 flash card called Screendrive 64. The key point is very simple and genius: a small screen is built into the cartridge body, which will switch with the game you load and display the corresponding cartridge sticker. In other words, what you insert into the N64 is no longer a flash card with “the same sticker forever”, but one that can change its face according to the game.
Price is only $50, 128MB FPGA, hardware compatible with PicoCart, 3D printed shell
Screendrive 64 sells for about US$50 (approximately TWD 1,598.03 / HKD 391.78 / MYR 201.60). It uses a 128MB FPGA internally and is paired with a real, hardware-compatible PicoCart. The outer shell is 3D printed. Its appearance may not be as “mass-produced” as the latest EverDrive series on the market, but the concept itself is quite interesting. It brings back the ritualistic feeling of “seeing stickers on the cartridge” of retro games in a very engineering-nerd way.
This design should be replaced by more flash card copying jobs
You can laugh at this as “to solve a problem that doesn’t exist,” but what the retro circle often buys is experience and ritual. Screendrive 64’s approach at least proves one thing: flash memory cartridges do not necessarily only pursue capacity, stability, and loading speed. Some people actually also want the thrill of that era of “seeing what they are playing at a glance.”
The next step is to see if any Chinese manufacturers integrate this small screen concept into more flash cards – after all, once this kind of thing is made beautifully, it will be difficult for you to go back and look at the sticker that you never change, right?