zeroone wrote:
I was just wondering how it ended up packaged as a NES file and if the NES file could be used as a BIOS in any emulator.
"I dunno, I'm not really thinking this through. There's no banking, it kinda looks like mapper 0. I guess it's mapper 0?".
No emulator does support loading a mapper 0 image and pretending its contents are an FDS BIOS. No emulator should ever support that particular encoding, that's just dumb.
Zzo38 has requested the ability to load an iNES-encoded FDS BIOS tagged as mapper 20, with the same indirect "load one rom then load secondary rom" used for the two dual-ROM modular systems (Karaoke Studio—m188 singleton and Nantettatte!! Baseball—m68 submapper, singleton). As well as desiring the ability to use the same UI for an endless stream of Game Genies...
Here's the rehash of my arguments why Zzo38's desire is a bad decision.
1- Having to manually interact with the system UI to explicitly load the the FDS BIOS first before you select the FDS image you want is bad UI and UX. (Selecting the FDS image tells the emulator that the user would have loaded the FDS BIOS)
2- iNES is a terrible container for the FDS BIOS
3- It is an unreasonably difficult task to modify the FDS hardware to replace its BIOS (the BIOS inside the same physical IC that physically holds the disk IO, audio hardware, &c: everything except the RAM). In practice, if one ever
did make a thus-modified FDS, it will be a singleton, and that will be the only copy in the whole world.
3b- if a person really wants to make a modified version of the FDS BIOS that can practically only ever be used in an emulator,
they can still tell the emulator to use their version that is not encapsulated in an iNES header.