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Comment by jbosh | Hacker News Reader

This is exceedingly cool use of cartridges. Just as a thought experiment I've often wondered if some of the cartridge based consoles could be expanded considerably. Along the lines of this project, would it be possible to throw an arm chip in a cart and send these as h.264? I'm not at a computer but would love to see how differently some modern codecs compress.

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On top of all the other examples, Hayazashi Nidan Morita Shogi 2 was a cancelled SNES games from 1995 that was going to us a 21MHz ARMv3 processor for AI. I just like the idea that they would throw in a processor that was probably about 5-10 times the power of the main system CPU.

That a very similar spec ARM processor would become the brain of the Gameboy advance many years later.

Assuming by SNES you mean Super Famicom (since there’s no way a shogi game was going to be localized!) - it did release. The NES port was cancelled, though.

Definitly! Check for example https://github.com/ShironekoBen/superrt allows for realtime raytracing on the Super Nintendo using a Cyclone-V FPGA.

See also tom7’s Reverse Emulation video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

The "making of" video is also great : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTlNVUmBA28

Yes. The Harmony Cart and the UnoCart/PlusCart both have ARM chips. Games have been made that make full use of the chip. Probably the most impressive IMO being Robotron from ChampGames.

The PlusCart also includes a WiFi chip for Internet access.

Exciting times in the world of the Atari2600.

I was thinking about making a chess cartridge for a famicom, with something like lower end arm in it.

There was a Super Famicom shogi title that did exactly that, Hayazashi Nidan Morita Shogi 2.

Thanks for the info!

You may already know this: there were pretty decent chess programs for 6502 CPUs back in the day; you don’t really need an ARM unless you want to run a modern chess engine.

Not for famicom afaik. And I see no point putting yet another 6502 on cartridge.

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