How is the NES Power Pak?

[David J.]

Just curious... I am trying to get an NES soon and I am looking at getting one. How is it?

[Lastcallhall]

I love it. Realistically - and by that I mean without downloading and expecting the entire NES romset to be played - with the exception of Castlevania III, it plays every NES game I could ever want to play, and I have Akumajou Densetsu for that (with the added bonus of VRC6 support!). The file system is a little wonky, but if you use a program like DriveSort, you should be good to go. I have my games by genre, then alphabetically within each subfolder. It's a little steep, but it's the best NES flash cart out there.

[Azathoth]

I bought one a year or so ago and have absolutely nothing but praise for it. Well worth the investment if you intend to play on real hardware. There's a few oddball games I'd like to play on it but can't (all unlicensed stuff) but for most of them the real cartridges are easily obtained.

Some driver sets even include save states, which is really cool.

[NeoVamp]

Great flascart, sucky gui though.

[Ace]

I would personally not play Famicom Disk System games on it as (unless what I saw was outdated) the FPGA-simulated Disk System FM sound doesn't really sound very good. The VRC6, on the other hand, is pretty much perfect, though it seems to be quieter than the real VRC6. At least, this video seems to suggest that:



I know the console is modified, but the difference in volume levels is obvious regardless of that fact.

I may pick up a PowerPak soon as I need a better way to play back NSFs than my current method which uses a buggy homebrew tool to play back NSFs (many NSFs I want to use either cause glitches with the UI, cause the NES to crash, have missing or corrupt instruments or simply don't work). And I would also like an all-in-1 cartridge so I can just take one cart with me if I want to take a good bit of games with me when I go see one of my friends who has an NES rather than lugging around a whole bunch of NES cartridges). If I do pick one up, I'll let you know what I think of the cart.