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Would it be possible or feasible to make a MSU-1 Game Genie style cartridge?
Yes, it would. Should work fine to add MSU1 to any flash cartridge or retail cart release. Won't work very well for old SNES copiers, but I think only koitsu still uses those today? Of course that was six years ago so maybe not even he does anymore.
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Actually the idea of combining a Game Genie concept and MSU-1 together would be really cool to use an original cartridge with patches to play CD quality audio.
It would be an absolute pipe dream, but I'd love if the MSU1 passthru device had user-upgradeable firmware on it, and you could add patches to it, so when you put Chrono Trigger US on there, it played it with orchestral audio. And when you switched to Super Metroid, it'd play its music instead.
But yeah, a pipe dream of a device. It would be easier for the passthru cart to just -be- a stealth flashcart that identified the inserted cart's game title and then streamed its own ROM copy like a flash cart would. You would just be wasting money on extra hardware and connectors just to add a thin air of legitimacy. And then people would put "patches" that turn the Super Mario kart into Super Metroid and ... yeah.
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But back to the ideas of making any CD-like SNES system today I think the MSU-1 as a standalone cartridge with bootstrap and some amount of RAM would be the most viable.
Yep, and it's already doable with the sd2snes today, and you can request 128KiB of SRAM.
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I don't know how expensive of a FPGA or other circuitry you'd need to implement the MSU-1
Yeah, that's a great question. It was super overkill on the sd2snes. You can even do MSU1 + other coprocessors at the same time.
If we released the board wiring and an FPGA program, I could even see the possibility of someone eventually doing a new SNES cart release with MSU1 built into it. We have gotten a few new SNES games in cart form recently.
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Having MSU-1 as a platform is also nice, going "Sonic and Knuckles"/"Action Replay 3" with it would help with costs as it could also host the CIC
And being honest, given the homebrew nature ... it could take a more "sane" media format for the game cards. Whether that's SD, or a USB HID device slot, or even just an IDE connector that's easier to buy mating adapters for the daughter boards.
The CIC could also be like ikari's and work for both NTSC and PAL regions.
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Any game designed for this is going to feel like an awkward multicart separated with lots of redbook audio.
Yep, it would just be an inferior PC Engine CD.
... and I'd still support it in a heartbeat if even
one official game disc were there for it. Maybe even a really good tech demo.
But aboslutely zero official software for it? No thank you. I'd rather make up my own devices.
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You're never going to get anything like the current market for homebrew SegaCD games on the SNES. It's just too rarefied to be relevant.
That and the 68K is easy to program for, and you can write decently performing C code for it.
No SNES add-on is going to fully abstract you from having to deal with the base 65816 you have to use to talk to the PPUs, or the nasty SMP->DSP if you want to do sound effects.
Sega CD users can use Redbook audio plus PSG sound effects. They don't have to deal with the Z80 or the YM2612 if it's too complex for them.
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jwdonal's at least half way there with VeriSNES.
Does it matter since jwdonal is keeping all his work to himself?
It's his right to, but is it going to help us? Is it like binaries on Windows where he can just give out 'compiled' Verilog and others can then use it on various FPGAs of their choosing?