I have been watching the various projects emulating the SNES on DS with great interest. Like everyone here I love portable gaming, and having the full back catalog of SNES games would be more than awesome.
As most of you know, an appreciable number of these old games might never be emulatable on the DS due to the special SNES chips. Games I want to play like Super Mario Kart.
I've been thinking about this problem and might have a possible solution.
The original carts had special chips for coprocessing and other tasks. So there is your answer.
What if someone created a slot 2 cart which could act like the DSP / SA-1 / what have you? I was thinking of something like an ARM + FPGA. Using a careful combination of HW & SW emulation the functionality of nearly all the SNES add-on chips could be simulated. With only a modest amount of memory you could have a slot 2 cart with an impressive catalog of SNES games functioning at nearly 100%
Do you think people would want something like this? The biggest problem I see is price. Unless I am wrong I figure you'd be lucky to sell more than a few thousand units. I did some back of the napkin math and I think at these volumes and working domestically it would be very hard to get something like this out the door for less than $100 / cart. That's including R&D time, prototyping and what have you.
It would also be crucial for the success of this project to involve the snezziDS and SNEmulDS teams early on in the process (if they wanted to). And they should be compensated somehow.
I don't think I have the resources or time to tackle something like this. If I get the gumption and want to add to the stress in my life I might go for it. In case I don't I wanted to throw the idea out to the community.
fiver
As most of you know, an appreciable number of these old games might never be emulatable on the DS due to the special SNES chips. Games I want to play like Super Mario Kart.
I've been thinking about this problem and might have a possible solution.
The original carts had special chips for coprocessing and other tasks. So there is your answer.
What if someone created a slot 2 cart which could act like the DSP / SA-1 / what have you? I was thinking of something like an ARM + FPGA. Using a careful combination of HW & SW emulation the functionality of nearly all the SNES add-on chips could be simulated. With only a modest amount of memory you could have a slot 2 cart with an impressive catalog of SNES games functioning at nearly 100%
Do you think people would want something like this? The biggest problem I see is price. Unless I am wrong I figure you'd be lucky to sell more than a few thousand units. I did some back of the napkin math and I think at these volumes and working domestically it would be very hard to get something like this out the door for less than $100 / cart. That's including R&D time, prototyping and what have you.
It would also be crucial for the success of this project to involve the snezziDS and SNEmulDS teams early on in the process (if they wanted to). And they should be compensated somehow.
I don't think I have the resources or time to tackle something like this. If I get the gumption and want to add to the stress in my life I might go for it. In case I don't I wanted to throw the idea out to the community.
fiver
