[kbrackbill]

This is really cool, thanks for the writeup. Love how thorough you were, one of my first thoughts was whether you could hook it up to a gamecube and it was already done in the blog post :).

One cool advantage of real cartridge compatibility I hadn't really thought about is that lets you not have to think about memory mappers (I'm mostly familiar with NES's dozens of different mappers, not sure if GB carts work the same way) and other custom cartridge hardware since you're just "emulating" up to the cartridge boundary. I guess this means even crazier hardware like the camera/rumble/sewing machine would "just work" with an original cartridge without any special support right?

I guess that doesn't save too much for this though if it supports loading ROMs. For that do you still end up having to emulate all the different mappers in the FPGA?

[elipsitz]

Thanks! Yeah, support for physical cartridges makes it a complete non-issue.

Mappers are a huge problem with the NES, but a much smaller problem with the Game Boy. There are only a few official ones (6 iirc), and one or two unofficial ones. And unlike the NES, the ROM includes a cartridge header that tells you which mapped chip is used.

For the GBA, there aren’t any mappers (except for one or two GBA video cartridges). There’s some extra hardware (like rumble or gyroscope), but not a whole lot. So yeah, I have to emulate all of those but it’s not much of a problem.