My experiences with InfiniteNESLives and Krikzz

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fys
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My experiences with InfiniteNESLives and Krikzz

Post by fys »

Hi

I'm posting this on the forums after being encouraged to do so. Pretty much everything is explained in the video.

Between the two I'm currently sitting at a loss of almost $200 from simply paying retail for their products.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHdasZA7I60
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Re: My experiences with InfiniteNESLives and Krikzz

Post by tepples »

fys wrote:Pretty much everything is explained in the video.
Do you plan to post a transcript? Or may I?
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Re: My experiences with InfiniteNESLives and Krikzz

Post by fys »

You have my full permission to do so.
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Re: My experiences with InfiniteNESLives and Krikzz

Post by tepples »

Today I would like to talk about a little issue that I have unfortunately noticed in the retro gaming community. As the community as a whole has grown, a new influx of hardware has been made to accommodate that: things like flash cards, specialty hobby electronics. Most of these are really good, especially things like the Hi-Def NES kit, the NESRGB, all these things that were made to make gamers' lives better, easier.

[0:41] Unfortunately at the same time, it seems that there has been an influx of -- I don't want to say shadiness, but it kind of comes across that way, where people are getting taken advantage of. Unfortunately I am one of them. I purchased about $200 worth of Super NES flash carts from a gentleman named Paul from Infinite NES Lives. He had a history of poor products, as demonstrated by kevtris and Jason from GameTechUS. And so I purchased because they were kind of the only alternative for someone like me at the time. I wasn't familiar with stuffing my own PCBs and soldering in all the different components. I was just learning at the time. Since then that's no longer an issue and I'll address that here in a minute.

[1:45] But I bought $200 worth of 32 megabit Super NES flash carts to load 32 megabit ROMs onto. This is very important because doing swapbin you can do only up to 16 megabits because, surprise surprise, the Super NES is actually only an 8-bit console.* So to get around that, people have developed flash carts that accept flash memory up to 32 megabits and beyond, but that's beside the point. I purchased these, $200 for flash carts plus the little Kazzo flash board that you need to write to them. It actually also works pretty well as a dumper. The software is shit though, for dumping and writing. I don't recommend it.

[2:36] Here's the thing though: it took a PayPal dispute and three weeks just for him to ship the order. What I got I was not happy with; I'm not impressed with the build quality at all. Three of the flash carts at about $20 each, it comes out to about $51 that I am now just out. I contacted Paul repeatedly on his "taking software", no response, no response, no response.

[3:20] Eventually I guess he got sick of hearing from me, and he's like "oh can you can look at this, can you try re-flashing, can you do this?

I was like "No, I did all that; it's dead."

He's like "OK, so send them back."

[3:32] So I sent them back Priority Mail tracked. I know you have them, Paul. And I'm like "Hey, can I get some money? Can I get my three boards replaced? What are you going to do about this?" Radio silence ever since then. And I've seen him update forum posts on NESdev, I know you're out there, Paul, and I know you have my boards. I would like my money, or I would like them shipped immediately to me. You know who I am.

[4:08] The thing that really pissed me off about this to actually make this video, though I had no intentions of ever doing anything in front of the camera again, was that Krikzz, the guy who makes the EverDrive, has been selling the Turbo EverDrive for about three or four revisions with knowing incompatibilities, knowing that it was a messed-up solution. So much so that version 2.4, 2.5, was just released, and he's finally saying that this is the one that works. I purchased a previous version knowing that it could have compatibility issues with my American TurboGrafx-16. But I purchased it knowing that I kind of wanted a CoreGrafx anyway, and if it didn't work and it exhibited the same symptoms that they typically do when trying to be used with an American TurboGrafx, I'd just buy a CoreGrafx and sell my TurboGrafx.

[5:14] Well lo and behold, I load it up, and whoa! Bonk's Adventure loads. Whoa! Keith Courage loads. This is a great solution. So I spent the evening playing the TurboGrafx, went back the next day and it's green screen. I was like that's odd. So I swap in an actual HuCard of Bonk's Adventure, which works perfect. I post about this on the forums and I get a private message from Krikzz telling me that I need to send my Turbo EverDrive that I had just purchased to Ukraine. I just purchased this thing. I want to play my EverDrive. I want to play my TurboGrafx. There are so many games I've been dying to play for years; I just couldn't afford them. I can't afford a TurboGrafx library. That's just the way it is; they're expensive games, it wasn't a terribly common system to be sold back in the day, so finding them in the wild is unheard of. And I'm not paying eBay prices; I'm just not. So my alternative was essentially piracy, which is what the EverDrive supports.

[6:28] Anyway, so I'm told to send it to Ukraine, and it's not to Krikzz himself; it's some repair guy that he claims that he has. I take it to get it mailed off, and for me to get it to Ukraine with tracking within two weeks was going to cost over $100. I can't afford that. So I sent it untracked. The Post Office told me that once it hits Ukraine, due to customs, it should be fairly trackable but not "trackable".

[7:05] I'm going to have to follow up on that soon because I e-mailed his "repair guy" and said "hey, this is my name, this is my information, did you receive my package? Because you were supposed to reach out to me if you had."

And his response was "Hello, need tracking."

"No, you don't need tracking. You need to tell me if you've received my package. That's how that interaction works."

Yeah, I'm a little pissed off; I'm not happy. I didn't get snippy with him; I haven't been snippy with anyone yet. This is me being snippy, just venting. So I'm sitting here, and that's where I'm at with that situation. I just wanted to touch on that.

[7:51] So these two are the two that are kind of notorious in the community. And no one speaks up; no one ever will. We deserve better than this for consumers. Am I whining a little bit? Yeah; that's my right as a consumer. I bought these things at retail prices to not have to deal with this stuff. And I'm sure from both ends, full disclosure, I make reproduction carts in my spare time. I don't really sell them; I've sold a couple Magical Pop'n. If you want to call me out and say I'm trying to trash XYZ or drive down the "value" of what they're offering: No, that's not the case at all.

[8:39] And thankfully, there are some alternatives. For example, I ordered these PCBs by [...] RetroStage. His product is amazing: you just pop in 32 megabit EPROMs, some SRAM, an ultra-CIC or one that you've taken off a donor board, and a couple of capacitors, and the rest is kind of optional unless you're doing save games. It's very easy to construct, $5 a board, about $15 in parts if you bought it just for one game, versus the $19 per board that Paul from Infinite NES Lives charges.

[9:45] That's really the majority of what I wanted to talk about. That pretty much covers it; it's just that I want people to know what to expect and where my concerns are right now with people coming up with the cheapest, easiest solution to prey on the retro gaming community and the influx of people that are interested in it.

[10:21] Honestly, I own currently an NES EverDrive that has been the topic of controversy because of its incompatibility previously with the Hi-Def NES kit which I do own. I had issues with it, and I had Krikzz outright deny that he had any issue, that it was not his problem. "Nah, my shit's perfect." And of course, he came out with a firmware upgrade to fix the non-issue.

[10:56] I don't like supporting these people. I'm officially going on record as saying that I don't support Infinite NES Lives, I don't support Krikzz, and I don't recommend that you do so either. I don't have the technical ability to reproduce what he's done with the Turbo EverDrive, and I'm not going to knock what he has done. But I'm knocking his business practices. Same for Paul at Infinite NES Lives. Good on you for coming up with Kazzo, though I'm not sure you came up with this board. Maybe he piggybacked the actual design for the flash cart, I don't know. But I don't support their business practices whatsoever.

[11:47] As an eBay seller, I know eBay has people by the balls and will force you to do refunds. This is why I'm glad that I paid Paul initially from PayPal, because he wasn't going to send my boards. I had to file a PayPal dispute just to get the boards, and three of them have issues. I understand things have issues. Hardware isn't perfect; software isn't perfect. But conduct yourself as a business, and if you do that, you'll have success.

[12:20] Anyway, this is running long, and I just wanted to at least get this out there and at least get the conversation started as to what's going on.


* Ed. note: The Super NES S-CPU has 16-bit registers and a 16-bit ALU but an 8-bit external data bus. This means it takes 8-bit memory. A lot of the larger flash memories are 16-bit, which works fine for the wider but slower data bus of the Sega Genesis.
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fys
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Re: My experiences with InfiniteNESLives and Krikzz

Post by fys »

Wow tepples, that was incredibly generous of you. I'm sorry you had to listen to me that much!

I wanted to add krikzz's response to my situation:
Did you leave email inside of package? You should receive notice with tracking if your cart were received and fixed. If you did not receive the notice, then package is not delivered yet.
We do not have log or database of received packages, nobody keeps in the mind what were received or not. Without tracking we can confirm that package were received, only if package still in the office right at this moment, othervise not possible to say if it not delivered yet or already sent back.
If you want to check status of package in any moment, then you should have tracking, othervise you will receive the notice only when it will be sent back.
I am honestly without words.
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Re: My experiences with InfiniteNESLives and Krikzz

Post by Drew Sebastino »

Who is this Krikzz person anyway?
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fys
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Re: My experiences with InfiniteNESLives and Krikzz

Post by fys »

Espozo wrote:Who is this Krikzz person anyway?
He created and sells the Everdrive line of products.
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Re: My experiences with InfiniteNESLives and Krikzz

Post by tomaitheous »

Espozo wrote:Who is this Krikzz person anyway?
:shock: ....
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Re: My experiences with InfiniteNESLives and Krikzz

Post by tomaitheous »

That sucks. I'm sorry to hear about the TED card too. I've been waiting for one of the newer ones, so I can release some special projects for it (it's got lots of ram on it for homebrew and hacks). Been waiting forever.
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Re: My experiences with InfiniteNESLives and Krikzz

Post by Drew Sebastino »

tomaitheous wrote:
Espozo wrote:Who is this Krikzz person anyway?
:shock: ....
What, is he an all-star? :lol: I can list a bunch of people here, (tepples, koitsu, memblers, tokumaru, bregalad, lidnariq, rainwarrior, Dwedit, psycopathicteen, Sik, etc...) but not once have I heard that name. The closest I've heard is Kevtris, who uses the JY Company logo:

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Re: My experiences with InfiniteNESLives and Krikzz

Post by lidnariq »

The supplier of the only current serious competitor to the PowerPak and super PowerPak is kinda famous, if only for that.
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Re: My experiences with InfiniteNESLives and Krikzz

Post by Drew Sebastino »

Wow. I must really be living under a rock... :roll:
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Re: My experiences with InfiniteNESLives and Krikzz

Post by tepples »

We are living under Barack, at least for one more year.

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Re: My experiences with InfiniteNESLives and Krikzz

Post by Drew Sebastino »

I assume you're not pro Obama? :lol:
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Re: My experiences with InfiniteNESLives and Krikzz

Post by tomaitheous »

lidnariq wrote:The supplier of the only current serious competitor to the PowerPak and super PowerPak is kinda famous, if only for that.
Outside the nintendo centric view, his cards are the only real option for other consoles for modern flashcard setups with a memory card interface. PCE, MD, SMS?

Wow. I must really be living under a rock... :roll:
Or maybe a Nintendo console? Even then.. ;>_>
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