Benjamin Sanderfer

As to my experience, I found that a lot of smaller games ran without issue. I created my own collection of about 400 games in a very short time while waiting for the product to arrive, and about 90% of them worked flawlessly. I was then lead to another collection created by someone else that had over 1,000 more games that I hadn't even started looking at yet, working and ready to go. For other games, I just used some trial and error and sometimes I got lucky. I got both "Death Knights of Krynn" and "Phantasie III" working with very little work by changing what file the disk image boots with (because they were cracked and the crack intros were causing the issue, but the program itself was running fine without them so I just bypassed them by using a tool in Windows to change the disk image itself). Sometimes it's just a matter of seeking out different versions of the game. Take "Defender of the Crown." I wanted a working copy of that game, but the two disk images I had weren't working at all. So, I went looking for other versions and found one that works as expected. There are some multidisk games running on D81 and CRT files that work great. Any of the EPYX games series (Summer Games, Summer Games II, Winter Games, California Games, etc), for example. In other cases, the game might work fine, but it's just a matter of getting multiple disks combined. BackBit has it's own file type for this called BBT, which can hold up to 4GB of information...and up to 8 separate disk images. You can also try to turn them into D81 files yourself or seek out other versions. To be fair, some games just flat out don't work. Doesn't mean they won't work at some point in the future, but that's just the reality of the situation. For example, "The Arcade Game Construction Set" won't load due to it's copy protection, which requires actual disk drive emulation to bypass in true emulation mode (which is why I can get it working on WinVice, for example). So, you have to adjust your expectations on some things. The nice thing about the cartridge, though, is that it doesn't take your disk drive port, so you can still run games from a real drive or even copy disk images to real floppy disks and run them from the disk drive. And then, just load up a Fast Load or Final Cartridge III image into the BackBit and use it for that. Lots of options. It's not perfect, but it does quite a bit for the price.

My understanding is that the Ultimate+ II is a cycle exact emulator of the disk drive. That means, in theory, it's going to be a lot more compatible with software, though it's likely a lot slower when it loads disk images (though, all of this is just guesswork based upon a YouTube video I just skipped through). I'm sure none of these solutions are perfect, and I can only provide a review of the one that I actually used.

I actually bought one of these cartridges. You can read my review of it here: https://enragedgeeks.blogspot.com/2020/01/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html