In the late 90s, a Taiwanese company used to modify Super Famicoms and turned them into ROM players by adding a CD drive connected with a backup device, into a nice shell. Any idea where to find one of these nowdays?
That's called a GameStation. It's by XGA industries of China (not Taiwan) their site is www.xinga.com, the owner is the guy behind NeoFlash. I own one, last year one sold on eBay for over $500. They were produced sometime between 1998-2001 and have been ofcourse sold out from every webshop for years. The device itself contains cloned SNES parts (poor quality, the SPC is very off and PPU(s) are slightly off) which are the same ones used in the SNES2 knockoffs by Success-HK. These are the only clones of SNES parts. There is also a Game Doctor SF7 daughterboard directly connected to the internal cartridge bus which has soldered DRAM (not upgradeable), DRAM is fixed to 32M unless you can solder TSOP. The GDSF7's cartridge bus is routed to a long IDC pins on the back of the unit and the GDSF7's floppy bus is routed to another set of pins. The lack of a built in floppy makes it difficult to back up NVRAM (save games) since there is also no access to the parallel interface. But it does provide the pins for you to add a floppy drive to save. There are two models of the GameStation, the first requires a MKE (Matsushita/Panasonic) interface CDROM which is the same used in the original GDSF7 CDROM, the second model contains a new IDE CDROM interface. Both units operate using a hacked GDSF7 BIOS adding support for the new interface and support for directories. I would not recommend one as it's cloned hardware; a real SFC/SNES (and original GDSF7) provides a far better experience. The only cool thing about the GameStation is it's cool looking controller (and the integration all in one case if you go for that.)
Thanks for the information, Calpis. It seems that I should try making one myself, but is even GDSF7 still available out there?
GDSF7 appears sometimes at ebay or check out this website: http://www.robwebb.clara.co.uk/shop/copiers/copiers.htm
If you are looking for a reasonably priced SF7, go over to http://www.tototek.com/, he has great condition SF7s as well as memory expansion boards and the DSP adapter. Almost everything on Robb's site is extremely overpriced.
