nesdev.org

There is more than just the decompression packs. The SPC7110 does have some math functions built into it as well, and not only that, in the case of Tengai Makyo Zero, you also have to deal with an RTC as well.

Rom addressing though, could be dealt with using unused address space.

How about supporting the Super Game Boy? Seriously though, which would be more difficult, the supporting the FX chip or the Super Game Boy?

Jagasian wrote:How about supporting the Super Game Boy? Seriously though, which would be more difficult, the supporting the FX chip or the Super Game Boy?

A whole gameboy emulator in there?
See the hell byuu went through here: http://board.byuu.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=364

I really think Super FX isn't that complicated when you consider it's just a CPU chip where as the Super Gameboy is an entire Gameboy system. That would be crazy though to have a SNES PowerPAK with a FPGA large enough to emulate the SGB allowing playback of GB roms on SNES.

It's really not that far fetched, it would take a 100-200K gate FPGA to emulate the GB. The SNES PowerPak ships with a 15K, so obviously it's not happening but the smallest FPGA made today are 50K gate, the average are 500K and the largest are like 2M. Not only would such a FPGA be able to emulate the GB, but it also NES, Atari etc using the SNES' I/O. I think it would be cool (but a hell of a lot of work).

MatthewCallis wrote:A whole gameboy emulator in there?
See the hell byuu went through here: http://board.byuu.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=364

Registration and manual approval required. Would you summarize?

Well I belive the Super-FX is a RISC, that means it was designed to work with as few transistors as possible to gain clock soeed right ? If I'm right that'd mean it'd fit into a smaller FPGA than a complicated processor right ?

tepples wrote:Registration and manual approval required. Would you summarize?

Basically...

byuu wrote:For those who don't remember, I implemented Super Game Boy support soon after v045 was released, but I was never able to complete it due to a lack of understanding how the $7800 register worked. I abandoned this support because it required building all of gambatte inside bsnes. That isn't a bad thing at all, gambatte is a great emulator. The problem was more all of that extra code and complexity for something that didn't really work.

If the SuperNES Powerpak's FPGA can't hold the SuperFX I think a good supplementary product would be a SuperFX only Powerpak light. Maybe with instead of a CP flash card reader built in it could connect directly to usb. Maybe with 4MB of flash space to keep cost down. I'd pay extra for a second supplementary cartridge like that. Or, more simply, an FX board with a ZIF socked for eproms for us sloppy solderers. Just some thoughts. I hope he can iron out the compatibility issues because this is awesome

there are plenty of people who would solder on some sockets to a super FX board around the forum for the right price, including myself.

Other than something like Star Fox 2, I'd imagine one could probably buy the whole short list of games that use the FX chip for about what it would cost to buy a specially developed flashcart.

I really think the only reasons anyone would want Super FX support would be A. Star Fox 2, and alot less likely B. to attempt to develop their own Super FX program. I think the answer would be A. 99 times out of 100.

No ! I really wish I could develop a game taking advantage of the FX (or something else cool) one day !
Altough it's probably doable by destroying a common Yoshi's Island cart.

SuperFX would be a hell of a lot easier than the Super Game Boy. Even with my SGB emulator, I had to exploit peeking at $2181-2182 to determine where the SGB BIOS was attempting to read from (it streams VRAM data from $7800 serially.) Of course, you can probably do that on real hardware, too.

I'm not sure what to think about that. On one hand, it's really awesome to have such an all-in-one cart, but on the other hand, if you're emulating the SuperFX anyway, why not just use an emulator? To me the only real advantage of real hardware is getting perfect accuracy.

Unfortunately a passthru cart won't work for the SFX and SA-1 since the program ROMs are behind the SFX chip. But for all the other special chips, you could create a T-connector. Preserve the perfect accuracy but allow custom data to be run.

As for SGB, I'd say it's easier to just use a real SGB and a Game Boy flash cart. Those are much easier to obtain, and you gain the benefit of perfect accuracy instead of using another emulator.

Registration and manual approval required. Would you summarize?

He was linking to a private forum. Hidden only so emu news sites don't update every single day about new WIP releases, which really just annoys everybody.

Registration is just anti-spam, so far 100% effective. Serious question -- how's open registration working around these parts? It's pretty terrible at the Zboard right now. </offtopic>

byuu wrote:just use a real SGB and a Game Boy flash cart. Those are much easier to obtain

During the GBC to GBA transition, near the start of 2002, it was a lot easier to get one's hands on a GBA flash cart than one for the GBC.

Registration is just anti-spam, so far 100% effective.

That depends on how you define spam.