That thing looks like crap too. It looks like a futuristic toaster. The controller looks like crap as well. Looks very uncomfortable, and I bet it controls like shit.
Who really gives a shit what it looks like? That's why it has ports for you're original controllers. Still going to buy one for the HDMI , I still have all the other original consoles for my crt. I doubt anyone is buying it for the looks , seems maybe you would fancy one in pink and purple with sparkles? Some things don't make anyone happy.
I would care what it looks like because I would have to look at it (if I bought one, which I won't). If you plan to ever look at it, you might not want it to look like crap. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you never look at it, then surely you won't care what it looks like!
I would hate to see you're closet. So basically you don't care about a console and how it works , you would rather it look good lol.
That damned Genesis sound... Still a tiny problem I'd come across time to time when using Kega Fusion. Even after messing with deep level setting constantly. Doubt if this creation will get it right either...
It's not exactly certain. What we know for certain is Mega Man X2, SDD1 games, and SA-1 games (not to mention some japanese exclusive chips) have issues with being read in dumpers and cartridge readers. SA-1 is the most difficult to deal with because the cartridge has circuitry in the SA-1 that trys to make certain that the console's lockout chip is functioning. If it is not then the cartridge ROM can't be read. I forget if SA-1 has any bankswitching. SDD1 supports bankswitching so that is something to worry about. Generally with these products we assume minimal R&D. So we should assume certain special chip cartridges won't work. Not an issue of emulating them so much as it is an issue with reading the cartridges. SNES is a bit of a mess but the real mess is NES and Famicom with all the different mappers. Just think if you have a cartridge that you have *zero* clue what is in it and you have to figure it out by probing it. For NES it's not too hard. You have MMC5, MMC3 (and the MMC6 variant), MMC2, MMC1, several discrete logic mappers, FME7 in the Batman game, and I'm sure a few others. But famicom it's insane. So lets say we have Mega Man inserted. So we are trying to figure out what mapper hardware there is. So we'll want to read the entire 32K cartridge space (8000-FFFF) and save that somewhere. Now we need to try writing the mapper, assuming that there is a mapper at all. What do we want to test for? I suppose discrete mappers first would be a good idea. But there are several of those. I guess we could just write a bunch of values to $FFFF and see if the 32K of PRG-ROM changes. But then we need to monitor the changes. You'd have to hope in the case of our Mega Man cartridge that you see that the $c000-FFFF area stays the same while the $8000-BFFF changes. Then you'd see that it's probably UNROM. But what if instead of Mega Man we had Battletoads inserted. When we write our values the whole 32K area changes. But there are other discrete mappers besides AxROM that will change the whole 32K area. I also didn't even mention the issue of bus conflicts. On UNROM games for example they always write to a small table of bytes that look like 00,01,02,03,04,05,06. That way the value being put on the bus will match the value the ROM chip responds with too, so that the mapper gets the correct value written. So there is alot that would need to be done for an algorithm to try to detect cartridge mappers to dump the ROM to be able to play it. One alternative that would work well for *existing* commercial games is to take every single known cartridge release and create hashes of their data so that when a cartridge is trying to be detected you could use a hash calculation to attempt to located the correct mapper. For NES, this would be pretty easy. NES has around I think 720 licensed releases? The hardest ones I suppose would be the games which have unpredictable power on states. But I think you could get around that by having multiple hashs for those games in your system. This works great for existing titles. But what about hacked or unlicensed titles? You can probably cover the "old" unlicensed games like Color Dreams. But what about games like Battle Kid 2? You'd need to add them as they come out. Not a big problem if the system's software can be updated. Famicom is a nightmare. While you could probably get all the licensed releases in your database, there are so many pirate carts. I still think the whole idea could work and work well though. But it'll never beat a real system.
