There are some upgrades to the underlying tech, though. One material improvement is the battery, which jumped to a 5,000-mAh cell from the EXP’s 3,000 mAh. Even with that bigger, brighter screen sucking up juice, the Nexus offers around five hours of play between charges, roughly an hour longer. On the audio front, the integrated front-facing stereo speakers are solid, offering louder, clearer output. Even better, the Nexus now supports Bluetooth, finally allowing you to connect wireless headphones, while still offering a 3.5-mm jack for wired headsets.
Bluetooth isn’t the only connectivity upgrade. The Nexus now supports the Wi-Fi 6 standard and can connect to 5-GHz networks (previous models could only use slower 2.4-GHz ones). That’s useful for downloading console updates and Evercade’s free Game of the Month. It also enables the new EverSync feature, unique to the Nexus, which allows multiple units to communicate wirelessly. Much like Nintendo’s GameShare, it’s set to allow multiplayer across devices even with only one cartridge, although I haven’t been able to test this feature yet.
The underlying OS also gets a refresh. Hop into the settings menu and you’ll find new customization tools. These let you adjust the color palette for the menu background and the glowing LED Nexus logo, select onscreen borders for non-widescreen games, and even tweak aspect ratios and virtual scan lines—all nice ways to personalize your device.
The glaring omission is any form of TV connectivity. Previous handheld Evercades featured a mini-HDMI out port, but that’s removed entirely here. It was always a nice-to-have rather than a major selling point, but it’s disappointing to lose a feature. Evercade players wanting TV play will have to opt for the Evercade VS-R set-top console.
A New Era for Old Games
While the Nexus hardware is a significant improvement, more exciting is where the games themselves may be heading. Almost every game on Evercade to date has been from the 8-bit or 16-bit era, if not earlier, a period that near-universally consisted of 2D titles. Adding thumbsticks opens the door to an entirely new generation of 3D games. Blaze says the Nexus works with 32- and 64-bit games, which dramatically expands possibilities for future releases.
Photograph: Matt Kamen
More impressively, the first two cartridges to benefit from this generational leap also see Evercade step beyond emulation for the first time. Both the Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie double-pack and the DOOM and DOOM II collection are natively ported. That means improved performance, intentional widescreen aspect ratios to match the display, higher resolutions up to 60 frames per second, and on-cartridge save slots rather than virtual quick saves.