The new Evercade system update is out and delivers an oft-requested feature: analogue controller support on the Evercade VS home system.
Blaze, the company behind the Evercade family, says this has been one of the most requested features since it started including 32 and 64-bit games on its Evercade cartridges.
The catch is that controller support is currently in beta, so don't expect every single third-party USB analogue controller you have in the house to work perfectly.
Blaze has also stated that it "presently" has no plans to produce an official Evercade analogue pad. It also assures Evercade handheld owners that, despite this new support, "analogue controls are not required for any Evercade games — all games have been tested to be fully playable (and beatable!) with just the D-Pad as the main directional control."
Once you've downloaded the new system update, you'll need to head to the Settings menu (using the standard Evercade controller), click on the System menu within and then select 'Enable Analogue Support For 3rd Party Controllers (BETA)'.
Plug in your third-party analogue pad, and then head to the remap buttons menu. From here, map all of the buttons are normal – you won't have the option to remap controls to the analogue stick, but the Evercade VS should automatically detect that once it's all done.
We've been told by Blaze that Xbox, PlayStation and 8BitDo pads should work fine, as well as some other brands. We've been using the 8BitDo SN30 Pro, which is detected by the Evercade VS as an Xbox 360 pad.
Analogue controls are supported by the following supported games:
- Worms Armageddon (Worms Collection 1)
- Speedball 2100 (The Bitmap Brothers Collection 1)
- 40 Winks (Piko Interactive Collection 3)
- Duke Nukem: Land of the Babes (Duke Nukem Collection 2)
- Duke Nukem: Time to Kill (Duke Nukem Collection 2)
- Glover (Piko Interactive Collection 4)
- Tomb Raider III: Adventures of Lara Croft (Tomb Raider Collection 1)
- Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (Legacy of Kain Collection)
The new update also brings a 'safe eject' feature for cartridges, rapid fire for certain arcade titles and automatic saving of high scores in relevant games. "We even managed to juggle our schedule enough to sneak in a hidden little secret for those who are on the ball, but we’ll leave that for you to discover for yourself," adds Blaze.