Mexican modder David Brito, known online as DAVIDXGAMESmx, has developed and made available for purchase the Screendrive 64, an N64 flash cart with a built-in screen that dynamically displays the cartridge label of whatever game is currently loaded.
We at Geek Realm Hub were the first to cover this project back on January 29th even before it had an official name. Since then it has continued gaining momentum, and today both ReCollect64, a community blog dedicated to N64 collecting, news, and preservation, and retro gaming publication Time Extension have published their own coverage, a clear sign that the wider community is finally catching up to what we saw months ago.
The concept is as straightforward as it is clever: instead of a static, generic-looking cartridge sitting in your N64 slot, the Screendrive 64 shows a live display of the label corresponding to the game you have running at any given moment. It’s a small detail, but for collectors and enthusiasts who care about the authenticity and feel of physical cartridges, it hits different.
The $50 cartridge features a 128 MB FPGA and a hardware-compatible PicoCart built around the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, all housed inside a 3D-printed shell. While it doesn’t carry the visual polish of premium options like the EverDrive line, it more than makes up for it with a feature no other flash cart on the market currently offers.
A $50 cart doing what no one else has done
Flash carts have been a staple of the retro gaming scene for years, and the N64 market is no exception. Options range from the open-source SummerCart64 at around $95, to the feature-rich EverDrive-64 X5 at $119, all the way up to the top-of-the-line EverDrive-64 X7, which sits above $199. Each one competes on compatibility, storage, and ease of use.
The Screendrive 64 doesn’t try to outperform any of them on those fronts. What it does instead is carve out its own lane entirely. The built-in screen is not a gimmick, it’s a genuine quality-of-life feature for anyone who values the visual experience of playing on original hardware.
Back when physical N64 cartridges were the only option, the label sticking out of the console was part of the experience. You could glance at it, your friends could see what you were playing, and it added a layer of personality to the setup. Flash carts eliminated that entirely, until now.
Getting a small screen to dynamically identify the active ROM and render the correct cartridge art in real time is not a trivial engineering task. The fact that DAVIDXGAMESmx achieved this inside a 3D-printed, $50 package is a testament to the quality of independent creators working in the retro modding space.
The PicoCart platform, built on the open-source Raspberry Pi RP2040, gives the Screendrive 64 a solid and well-documented technical foundation that goes well beyond a weekend hobbyist project.
The retro modding community keeps raising the bar
Projects like the Screendrive 64 are a reminder of just how alive the N64 community remains in 2026. DAVIDXGAMESmx isn’t a major hardware manufacturer, he’s an independent creator from Mexico who identified a gap nobody had filled and built something to fill it. That spirit of innovation from within the community is exactly what keeps retro gaming relevant and exciting decades after these consoles left store shelves.
The Screendrive 64 is now available for purchase directly from DAVIDXGAMESmx. For collectors, hardcore N64 fans, or anyone who appreciates a creative and well-executed idea from the modding community, it’s one of the more interesting N64 accessories to come along in recent memory. The 3D-printed shell and handcrafted nature of the product only add to its appeal, this is not a mass-produced item, and that’s part of the point.
In a market where flash carts tend to look and feel interchangeable, the Screendrive 64 stands out by doing something genuinely new. And at $50, it’s hard to argue with the value.
What do you think about the Screendrive 64, would you add it to your N64 setup, or are you sticking with a traditional flash cart? Let us know in the comments!