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So, flash carts anyone?

I've dabbled a bit in roms and rom hacks in the past. Seeing as there appears to be a smw hacking renaissance going on right now, I'd like to get back onto it.

Problem is, emulation can be complicated. No matter how I configure setting, or what controller I plug in, I just can't seem to recreate that good old snes experience I grew up with. Recently though, I've discovered the existence of flash carts. These are cartridges that plug into uour old snes and emulate roms stored on a sd card. A lot of the popular kaizo streamers on twitch use them to play their various rom hacks.

Now I'm no kaizo player. But if I were to begin shopping for a flash cart, what would I need to look for? Are there some that are capable of loading hacked roms and others that aren't? And if a flash cart were able to load a vanilla rom hack, would it be able to load a chocolate (or otherwise heavily altered) rom? I mean, rom hackers are showing themselves capable of some pretty crazy stuff nowadays.
There are two flash carts, super everdrive and sd2snes.

Super everdrive is cheaper, but it doesn't support any games with special chips(only DSP in some cases), it lacks some fancy features like save states and loads roms slowly(reloading previously loaded rom is instant though).

SD2snes is the premium one, its way more expensive, but it supports superFX and SA-1 chips, save-states, loads roms very quickly etc.


As for playing SMW hacks, super everdrive works for everything that doesn't use SA-1 chip, but sd2snes plays those. There however are old hacks, that uses the old addmusicK that was piece of shit so those hacks only works on the zsnes emulator. Hacks that has either of those are clearly marked(I think) on the download selection.

I have super everdrive and all hacks I've tired plays no problem, some of them has some slowdown, or aren't designed with CRT overscan in mind, but for most part they aren't major problems(and the overscan issue varies a lot from TV to TV). Hack being vanilla or heavy-chocolate doesn't matter even on super everdrive, as long as its not using SA-1 or old addmusicK(broken music on newer emulators/flash carts).


Heres list of games with special chips in them, in case you aren't familiar with it.
Originally posted by JP32
There however are old hacks, that uses the old addmusicK that was piece of shit so those hacks only works on the zsnes emulator.


I'm glad you mentioned this, I'm just starting and have been trying to get addmusick to work. It's somewhat working but glad to know to look for the alternative.