We have no choice; We seem to have used up every last Kingston 32GB card on the planet, and Kingston has stopped producing cards in this capacity. The store will need to switch back to SanDisk media for this capacity, or until we can find a new supplier with other brands available in bulk quantities.
Welcome to my TED Talk:
The Eternal Retro Store switched a while back from SanDisk to Kingston media, specifically in 32GB capacity, due to a rare(ish) but known issue that seems to plague SanDisk media (and only SanDisk 16/32GB media) and the Krikzz EverDrive specifically. Usually Error 44: The microSD simply will not be initialized by the flash cart. This seems to only ever happen with 16/32GB cards. (Or at least we’ve never run into an issue where 64GB-1TB capacities ever did this.) This incompatibility is a known issue with Krikzz developers on their forums for a few years; no one is exactly sure why it happens, but it is also such a specific edge case there is no real desire to invest the time and effort to figure out what is causing it. The official Krikzz fix is “just try another memory card.”
SanDisk cards are great, over 93% of the time. There are numerous references to such problems across multiple gaming forums specific to the EverDrive, which we have confirmed with a sample size now in the thousands, in which some EverDrives will not work with some SanDisk cards. When we were tracking the issue, before switching media brands, it was as high as 7% of the time. Which is fine for a home user building these cards themselves (something we do encourage learning to do!) when you can just return it on Amazon and all you’re out is an extra afternoon of your time. For a business, 7% is an unacceptable failure rate. Since switching media to Kingston, this problem was nearly eliminated.
The problem we found was not just that “SanDisk cards don’t work in EverDrive” but an extremely specific incompatibility where this microSD just wouldn’t work in that EverDrive. The same card would very often work just fine in other EverDrives, and our testers in the case of returns.
We even had one instance a few years ago where one customer purchased two cards; one for the EverDrive-GB and one for the EverDrive-GBA. Neither card would read. Reformatted and rebuilt fresh, they still wouldn’t read. On a whim, we tried swapping the media; this time using the media that the GBA didn’t like in the GB, and vice-versa. Both microSDs then initialized and worked fine. The problem was very much media/flash cart specific. This card was fine, it just didn’t work in that flash cart. Unexplainable, but a known issue.
While we investigate possible sources for other branded media bulk, at acceptable prices, we’ve thus been forced to switch back to SanDisk for now. Which means we may once again run into a percent failure rate we haven’t seen in a while.
We wish to apologize in advance for any issues this may cause in a few percent of cases, but want to assure our customers we will always make it right.
Keep on Gaming
-Chairman Maoio