Quite right.
They aren't arbitrary.nor do they care about what arbitrary restrictions you've set.
Legitimacy and honor. It's dishonorable to me to put a computer inside of or attached to another computer and call it a video game running on the host computer. No one who has any idea what's going on thinks that a Game Boy game playing via the Super Game Boy is an "SNES" game, and that's even weaker of a case because the ~LR35902 CPU in the Super Game Boy is nowhere near as powerful as the SNES's 5A22 CPU.What are you gaining by not using a co-processor at this point?
Also, it would greatly increase the complexity of both the hardware engineering and the software engineering to have to deal with two different CPUs whose interface is something semi-custom and limited by whatever bus shenanigans we could dream up. The reason that something like the Super FX was invented is that it was fundamentally more capable of generating 3D graphics than the SNES by itself was, and the economics of the day justified it.
What we're doing is, at its core, memory mapping. It is not fundamentally different than what MMC1, MMC2, MMC3, MMC5, FME-7, and the other classical memory mappers did. We don't want to do more than what they did. We just want to do it better with the benefit of hindsight and all the wonderful modern tooling and documentation that is now available.
This is a reasonable question. It's targeted both at semi-technical people that are curious about what the memory mapper development part of the project is about, and at the fully technical people who might be willing to entertain the reasoning that led us to where we are.There's lots of justification, but I'm wondering who it's targeted at.
Hopefully!Non-technical people will love the game regardless
Hopefully! However, the bulk of the work on this project is on the software engineering side, not the hardware engineering side. We've had to invent a lot of novel things in code in order to make this elaborate of a game possible on the NES. No amount of hardware support could've helped us grapple with the incredibly limited and obtuse sprite subsystem of the 2C02, for instance.and hardware people can see it as a really cool accomplishment
Well, that's unfortunate. But I think if asterisks are being laid down in such a gatekeeping fashion, they should also put around The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Super Mario Bros. 3, and basically every other good game in the NES game library as well.but I don't think you'll convince programmers - there'll always be an asterisk around the project with them.
I cannot hammer home enough that MXM-0's circuit complexity has been kept at or below MMC5's for the entire project, and it's going to stay that way. This is a very real constraint and it's almost entirely the ultimate justification that is needed for the prevention of those asterisks you speak of.
-jekuthiel