Evercade Nexus Arrives With Larger Screen and Dual Thumbsticks for 3D Games

Blaze Entertainment announced the Evercade Nexus, a retro handheld that adds dual analogue thumbsticks to the cartridge-based platform for the first time, a hardware change explicitly designed to address the 3D console generation that earlier Evercade models were never built to handle.

The Nexus carries a 5.89-inch IPS panel, what Blaze describes as the "biggest Evercade handheld screen yet," with a resolution of 840×512 pixels. That represents a modest jump from the 800×480 display on the EXP-R, itself the successor to the original Evercade's 480×272 screen. The raw resolution numbers tell a restrained story; the dual-analogue sticks tell a bigger one. PS1, N64, and Sega Saturn titles, the specific systems Blaze names as the Nexus's target, depend on analogue input in ways the prior button-and-d-pad architecture of earlier Evercade hardware could not replicate.

Blaze is pricing the Nexus at $199.99 in the United States and £169.99 in the United Kingdom, with availability scheduled for October. That places it considerably above the original Evercade's introductory price of $80 when Blaze launched the first model in May 2020, signaling a deliberate move toward more premium positioning.

The company is framing the Nexus's software reach with a claim of "best-in-class emulation from over five decades of gaming," a span running from the Atari 2600 through the PS1, N64, and Sega Saturn. Backward compatibility with the full existing Evercade cartridge library is preserved, with the Nexus using the same physical ROM cartridges as its predecessors. Local multiplayer support is included under what Blaze is calling "Eversync," though technical details on the protocol behind that feature were not disclosed at announcement.

Banjo-Kazooie and its sequel Banjo-Tooie appear prominently in Nexus promotional materials, though Blaze has not specified whether those titles are bundled with the hardware or associated with a separate cartridge release.

What Blaze has not disclosed publicly are the Nexus's internal specifications: CPU model, RAM, battery capacity, and connectivity options remain unconfirmed. The EXP-R ran on a 1.5 GHz processor with 4 GB of RAM, a 3,000 mAh battery, and included a mini-HDMI port for television output. Whether the Nexus carries equivalent or upgraded internals will ultimately determine how comfortably it handles the PS1 and N64 library Blaze has staked its marketing claim on, and whether anything beyond that generation is feasible.

The original Evercade launched on a 1.2 GHz Cortex-A7 processor with 256 MB of RAM before Blaze discontinued it in May 2022 in favor of the EXP. The Nexus is the third major handheld iteration in the platform's six-year history, and the first to treat analogue 3D control as a hardware priority rather than an afterthought.