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Comment by tibbon | Hacker News Reader

In theory, could you make some ultra-modern SNES game using a modern ARM chip or such in the cart? Still some basic system limitations, but running pretty much everything on the add-on chip?

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It's more or less been done on the NES - using a cartridge with a Raspberry Pi Zero in it to run SNES games: http://radar.spacebar.org/f/a/weblog/comment/1/1157

It's also roughly how the Super Game Boy worked - it had a Game Boy CPU in it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Game_Boy

I am doing that for PalmOS 5.0 with reSpring actually: http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm

> I settled on the 4KB part purely based on cost. Even at this measly 4KB size, this one RAM is by far the most expensive component on the board at $25. Given that the costs of putting in a 64KB part (my preferred size) were beyond my imagination (and beyond my wallet's abilities), I decided to invent a complex messaging protocol and make it work over a 4KB RAM used as a bidirectional mailbox.

Is this not the sort of memory you'd need?

https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/cypress-semiconduc...

https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/idt-integrated-dev...

just trying to understand the details here.

Those are similar to the ones I am using. Yes. And prices are similar too. Sadly....

Next rev I am replacing it with a small FPGA which will act as dual port memory. Believe it or not, that is much cheaper.

Whaaa? This, good sir, is fascinating! I am a huge fan of PalmOS and still use my Palm every day. I would love to make a custom Palm with a custom PalmOS but never even considered the plausibility or possibility. I’m gonna read through this now.

In fact, you can take it even further! tom7 (all of his pieces are amazing) put a raspberry pi into an NES cartridge, and manages to "run" Super Mario World on an NES.

My short description really does it a disservice - I strongly recommend watching the video explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

To be fair 'Super Mario World' already runs on the Nes.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TEZ3vZIi71g

This guy ported wolf3d to the Gameboy Color more or less that way (looks like all the game logic is still on the Game it's CPU and just the ray-casting is done on the co-processor)

http://www.happydaze.se/wolf/

Yeah, the SNES would pretty much turn into a (crappy) AV hub.

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