I have an EverDrive N8, v1.3, made June 2013 (but bought December 2015). I expected to ditch my NES-001 for a Famicom, so I got the N8 in a Famicom form factor, but then I bought a Blinking Light Win and that brought my NES back to life. Consequently, my setup is EverDrive N8 v1.3 > KRIKzz Famicom to NES converter > Blinking Light Win > NES-001. Not pretty, I know.
My problem: when I play early releases -- Sky Kid, Gumshoe, Goonies II, Ring King, Urusei Yatsura: Lum no Wedding Bell -- they crash or reset sooner or later. I can go about 50-60 minutes in Sky Kid before I start to see crashes. Lum no Wedding Bell tends to crash sooner.
Meanwhile later games (Moon Crystal, Mitsume ga Tooru, Robocop 2 come to mind) are almost always fine, and I've had very long, crash-free sessions in games with no continues/passwords. Middle-era releases are usually OK. Original NES carts are fine.
Important data point: when I first boot up Sky Kid, I see a handful of what I think I've seen described as PPU dropouts -- momentary glitches, 1 scanline in height and about 8-10 pixels wide (rough guess). These show up as white lines on a black screen, and black lines on a light blue screen. After the first 10-15 seconds these dramatically decrease.
Is this likely to be a power draw issue? If so, is it caused by having an older model of EverDrive N8? Or is it an issue of failing caps or bad RAM in my NES? Or, somehow, the Famicom-to-NES adapter (doubt it) or the BLW (also doubt it)?
It's weird that newer games with more advanced mappers work fine -- almost makes me wonder whether games that use on-cart RAM are "safer" -- or maybe later games just had better error-handling routines.
Things I've tried:
- Switching between a bunch of different power supplies: original AC, aftermarket AC, Sega Genesis PSU that supplies DC. Result: no change.
- Moving from a house with sketchy, outdated electrical wiring, into one with much more modern wiring. Result: still getting crashes, though maybe the frequency has dropped. (But Sky Kid crashed on me today right before Level 25, after 45 min. of problem-free gameplay.)
- Swearing, yelling, cursing. Result: blood pressure increase, no other changes.
- Updating to the latest version of the EverDrive OS for my hardware. I ought to do this, but I doubt it's the cause.
- Buying an EverDrive N8 Pro. If a newer hardware revision will fix this, I'm all for it, but I'm not made of money and no one will want to buy my 9+ year old v1.3.