Is It Safe To Buy The Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak From Aliexpress?
Nintendo 64 is one of the consoles I like to play on from time to time, as opposed to emulating it. The one I have is the same one I had in my childhood days. I have a multicart I use to play all sorts of games on it. But since I don’t have the expansion pak, I couldn’t play certain games on it. Like Majora’s Mask, Perfect Dark or Donkey Kong 64. These 3 are the only official games you need the Expansion Pak for, so it wasn’t a big deal for most of the time. I could play Majora’s Mask on the 3DS, or even through some of the recompilation projects that came out a while ago. After a while, I found out there are many ROM hacks that require the Expansion Pak. Like Smash Remix or Mario Kart Amped Up. In addition to that, I started to miss Donkey Kong 64. It has been quite a while since I last played it, so I thought about finally getting one.
Buy the Expansion Pak from AliExpress (Sadly, the seller I bought the Expansion from no longer sells it, so I will leave this affiliate search link instead).
Quickly go to:-
Aliexpress Comes To The Rescue
There are many listings for the Expansion Pak on eBay & Amazon. I also found it sold on AliExpress, and that’s where I got mine. Since I like how low it costs to buy from there if you take into account shipping & taxes. Not to mention that buying & reviewing stuff from AliExpress is one of the things I do regularly here in Tech Fairy.
The Expansion Pak I got wasn’t a clone but a used one. It’s actually not that easy to clone it as far as I know. For one, it uses RDRAM, a type of RAM that has been out of production for years (some guy did an open-source version of it, but you still need to get your hands on RDRAM to make it ). Given the nature of the Expansion Pak, it will either work or it will not. To be on the safe side, I made sure to get mine from a reliable seller that offers a good price. That alone isn’t really enough to avoid being scammed, but I know AliExpress would have my back if anything went wrong.
The first thing I did to try the Expansion Pak was to run Majora’s Mask. It worked right away. I also played Vigilante 8, and I tried raising the resolution to take advantage of the extra memory, and the difference was instant. I can now safely say that the expansion pak works. I didn’t stop there. I played Smash Bros Remix & Mario Kart Amped Up. So far, I haven’t faced any performance issues, like freezing or stuttering. I am quite satisfied with the Expansion Pak so far.
And Finally
While I can’t vouch for every seller that sells the Expansion Pak on AliExpress, I know the one I got works. I faced no issues with it, and I will make sure to update this review if anything happens.
I hope you found my experience with buying the Expansion Pak from AliExpress useful, and I will see you in another Tech Fairy article. Check out the mobile apps I developed, which I hope you find useful & interesting.