Thanks for the link! Price seems to be significantly higher, though. Not sure what import fees would be but if the official site really does a black friday deal it should still be like 40% cheaper and I can wait 5 weeks for shipping, that's alright.
i dont think there would be import fees since ur also in the eu
ive ordered plenty times from austria most likely austrian uncut versions of games and some like the special postal x box were pretty expensiv normaly anything above 22€ there would be fees except from other eu countries maybe its germany specific
but yeah if you can wait that would be probably the best option for you
In short: I went with the Everdrive-GB X7 and am very happy with my purchase!
In detail:
I did end up buying from everdrive.me. It seems like a quasi-official store (although krikzz.com also exists). I waited for a black friday sale on Nov 22. They're from Ukraine and make it clear that due to the war, there might be delays, with shipping taking between 20-50 days for Germany (I'm from Austria but we usually have very similar shipping conditions).
Payment was comfortable over Stripe but one mistake I made was not registering on their website. I saw detailed shipping information at checkout but couldn't track it later since I couldn't log in. After 3 weeks, I considered writing them asking for a way to view the status but literally that moment I got confirmation that the package had arrived at a nearby post office!
There were warnings that the package might get stuck at customs. I checked the tracking details that came with the package arrival notification and it said that the package was sent Nov 27, took about one week to arrive in Austria and one week at customs. I had to pay a little over 12€ in taxes when picking it up at the post office (which is exactly 10% of the full USD price on their website). Ultimately, with the sale I saved a little more than the amount spent on taxes + shipping.
The cartridge arrives in a surprisingly fancy cardboard box with generous plastic foam padding.
By default, the cartridge arrives without an SD card. I had a cheap, no-name C10 card with 32GB lying around and it seems to work just fine!
You have to "install" the latest version of their OS from krikzz.com. This involves unzipping a folder with a single file into the root folder of the SD card. I managed to mess this up by copying the file directly to the root of the SD card. It has to be in the correct folder (GBCSYS/GBCOS.BIN). Then it worked!
The boot menu doesn't sort your ROMs alphabetically by default! It is shown in the order it is stored in the SD card's memory which can be different. Since I primarily use macOS, I had to use a program called FatDriveSorter to fix this. There's also a program called Drivesort on Windows.
I'm very happy with how well everything runs! I tested out dozens of games, including some rather obscure homebrew stuff, everything runs flawlessly. The physical button at the top of the cartridge is tiny but surprisingly solid and easy to reach, from people's descriptions I expected something more flimsy/inconvenient. It lets you enter the Everdrive menu and save/load your progress or return to your ROM list (note that there are a few games out there where it doesn't work due to technical reasons). It also remembers the last game played so you don't have to scroll through your lists when you just want to pick up where you left. Time spent in menus is usually measured in seconds, I don't know if you could improve loading times with a higher quality SD card or something, I have absolutely no complaints as it is.
Thanks for all your recommendations and advice, much appreciated!
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