Discussions with kevtris and other people on #nesdev have shown me that ultra-low volume is the enemy of cost-effective reproductions of homebrew NES games. The only way I can see to up the volume is to make it like some of the counterfeit GBA games, many of which are just programmed onto cards like this $9 cart. So part of the solution would be to produce a general-purpose flash card like the GBA ones. This could be programmed in a CopyNES or in a dedicated device like a Retrode or Flash Linker. Now the NES is different from the GBA in that not all cartridges are created equal (with respect to e.g. mappers), but we can still pick a baseline that's good enough for plenty of homebrew projects: SNROM (MMC1 with CHR RAM and PRG RAM).
My question: At how many thousand carts does it become cost-effective to produce an ASIC, compared to a CPLD + CIClone + two 6264 SRAM chips? And if "the community" can get the Pandora PDA mass-produced, can we do the same thing for a 256 KiB NES flash cart?
My question: At how many thousand carts does it become cost-effective to produce an ASIC, compared to a CPLD + CIClone + two 6264 SRAM chips? And if "the community" can get the Pandora PDA mass-produced, can we do the same thing for a 256 KiB NES flash cart?