I have 2 controller paks, a 1st party one and a second party one.
One never works (the x brand)
The other always corrupts
I have both an official and two unofficial controller paks, and all of them work fine. Are the batteries in your two working properly? If nothing else, you should be able to pick up new controller paks cheaply enough from local shops or online.
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didn't the everdrive act like its own controller pak?
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No, the ED64 doesn't act like a controller pak, at least not when a game is saving or loading. Copied and pasted from an earlier post of mine:
Without an Everdrive 64 (i.e. just an N64) game saves are saved either to the original N64 cartridge itself, or on the controller pak (the gamesave memory pak that fits into the joyapd itself), depending on the game itself. Games like Goldeneye, Super Mario 64, and Ocarina of Time save to their own cartridges, whereas games like Duke Nukem: Zero Hour, The World is Not Enough, and Rocker: Robot on Wheels, need a controller pak to save to.
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With the Everdrive 64, the games that should save to their cartridge instead save to the SD card (the same card that contains all of the game roms), and you can, if you like, insert the SD card into your PC or Mac, to backup or restore the save files. However the save game is not written to the SD card until you press reset on the N64, so if you turn off the N64 without first pressing reset then you'll lose the save game.
So when you play a game like Super Mario 64 (i.e. a game that saves to it's own cartridge), what you do is, turn on the N64 with the Everdrive 64 in, load the game from the menu, play the game as usual, the game will save as normal* at the usual save points (save as often as you like over the playing time, only the final save counts) and when you've finished the game, DON'T turn off the N64, instead RESET it. Even if you don't want to play on the N64 any more and you're going to turn it off, first make sure you press RESET, as only when the N64 resets does it save the game save to the SD card.
* In actual fact, when a game (that's running on an N64 with an Everdrive) thinks it's saving to it's cartridge, then it's actually saving to RAM (memory) on the ED64, and the data from the RAM is only really written to the SD card when RESET is pressed on the console itself.
As for games that save to the controller pak, even with the Everdrive 64, games that save to the controller pak still need a controller pak to save to, as those saves aren't re-routed to the ED64's SD card. Those games just save and load to the controller pak as usual (and you don't need to press reset when you've finished playing these games, but it's good to get into the habit of pressing RESET after every game, so that way you never forget to do so for the games that need it).
And as Ozidual says, even though games that only save to the controller pak still can only save to the controller pak, using the ED64 (Everdrive 64) you can backup and restore the controller pak to the SD card, so you can then store the gamesaves on your PC or Mac.
The above applies to the versions 2.0, and 2.5 of the Everdrive 64. I don't have a version 3.0 (I have a v2.0, which is fantastic, and the v2.5 is no different to the v2.0 except it has a slightly re-designed motherboard, there's no difference in use) and I'm not 100% sure when the v3.0 saves to the real SD card, so I can't advise there.
