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Comment by flkenosad | Hacker News Reader

Pretty cool idea to ship ram and disk space with the application. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Imagine if phones worked like that and you could buy a new cartridge every couple years when chip technology improves or if you want to run some hard-core application. Or if you want to attach a new type antenna. My mind is wandering now.

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Modular phones have been proposed for ages now but seem not viable or useful. Having everything on sockets increases latency between chips and decreases reliability. Especially something that's getting banged around in your pocket all day.

And there isn't really just one thing that gets outdated on phones. You usually want a better screen, better camera, better CPU, more ram, new battery. And at that point why swap each one individually vs just buying a new phone. I guess you save on the metal case?

> And there isn't really just one thing that gets outdated on phones. You usually want a better screen, better camera, better CPU, more ram, new battery.

I can't help but notice that you don't mention the part that makes it a phone (e.g. the 2G/5G/Wifi modem chip). Maybe one should actually sell those as cartridges... Nevermind, that would be a PC-Card.

It's more like a separation between backend and fronend. All the hidden tech goes in the cartridge and your screen and touch inputs are your frontend. Most people like their UIs to stay consistent even when new stronger, faster technology comes around so idk man.

I don't think that's true. Companies change up the design of the phone all the time because people want something that looks and feels new.

I think its a good idea too, however does there come a point there you're also limited by the hardware it is plugging into? You might be able to include faster RAM in the cartridge, but will it work as intended with the original board its being plugged into.

Could you attach faster storage if the underlying hardware its plugged into isn't changing. I guess you could but I don't have a lot of experience in that area.

You can do pretty much anything if the cartridge is advanced enough. At that point you just output a framebuffer from the cartridge the screen should show with no computation happening on the actual gameboy CPU.

People built cartridges which stream game footage from a PC to the gameboy and relay the inputs back to the PC to "play" GTA 5 on an original gameboy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX1opw_gsBs

Sitting here at work negotiating on an increasingly complicated hotpatching system for microcontroller ROMs, I can totally see why it fell out of favor. It is a great help to have the whole application on chip ready to go, but people keep wanting to change things.

What sort of microcontrollers? Could it just be the interface is not yet mature?

Full custom. That is, not only is it our own DSP architechture and own instruction set, but the firmware running on it.

Normally we'd have the firmware loaded from elsewhere on system boot at the cost of a few hundred miliseconds, but for the current project we need a much larger firmware and the bootup time is prohibitive. So we've ended up with a three-way partition of functionality. A "standard library" of mature functions in ROM, an application-specific set of medium maturity functions in OTP (one time programmable) which can be changed without needing an expensive metal layer respin, and finally the actual application in RAM.

Or even a camera

For real! I imagine you could do some really cool shit with something like that. Like massive lenses or purpose build rendering chips.

They really did make a camera!

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