Evercade Game Machine

Yesterday found me at the Video Game Market in Leeds It was quite a bit bigger than I expected. I thought we’d go in, spend half an hour looking around and then head out for lunch. But lunch had to be put back an hour or so because there were so many stands and so much stuff. It was busy, but not terribly so. They had phased entries at different times of the day. We were in the second sitting, starting at 12:00 so there might have been some amazing bargains that were snapped up by the 10:30 folks. But, there were also lots of things worth having.

I’ve been watching the progress of Evercade for a while. They have a mission to put classic old games into the hands of players who don’t want to have to mess around with strange hardware emulators and search for unlicenced ROM images. Their first machine was a small handset with a 4 inch screen (although you can plug it into an HDMI display if you want to). One of the stands had a one of these plus a stash of cartridges at a reasonable price so I made a carefully considered purchase….

The device works well. The screen is bright and the controls are just right. Each cartridge comes with a little booklet with game details and controller info. I don’t remember “Bad Dudes” or “Karate Champ” (classics in the Data East collection that I got with the set) but I’m looking forward to giving them a spin.

Evercade are working their way through various platforms and they seem to be good at tracking down and licencing lots of classics, including ones from the Bitmap Brothers, Gremlin, Team 17 and whatnot. The cartridges are pocket money priced (if you get more than 17 pounds pocket money) and Evercade are now branching out into consoles to go under the TV and even free-standing mini-arcade machines. I’m pleased with my purchase, and I’m very tempted to try and find space for one of their little arcade machines….