I have experience with electronics and hardware, mainly with the C64 and Apple ][ scene. There is a board called the C-One reconfigurable computer. It is basically a motherboard with empty sockets on it + additional hardware allowing a person to use the original chips off 6502 based computers. The purpose is to keep its original hardware capabilities/compatibility and enhance it with new features expending what can be done.
This got me thinking, what if the same could be done for the NES? Possibly even a PCI card or USB. The idea would be to have a PCI card in a modern day Computer that could allow a person to run NES games through an application that communicates directly with the hardware without the use of emulation. This would be a lot like a Development board used for the N64 in SGI computers. A Cartridge slot could be added to one of the 5.25" Drive bays and the games could be loaded from there, or directly from the computer. Obviously for the computer loading aspect to work, it would need to emulate the different mappers, but other than that, everything would be running natively.
The planned approach would be to use an FPGA-PCI board with address lines connected to an NES board and attempt to have it communicate directly with the system. Easiest approach may be to replace the NES CPU altogether since all the opcodes on a 6502/6510 are well documented, and all the hardware on the NES connects to it. This would allow for some rather interesting possibilities in terms of being able to address more memory or operate at higher clock speeds.
I remember there was someone working on cloning the PPU of the NES to allow for RGB video without sacrificing a PlayChoice 10. The work from that could be used for capturing the video data from the hardware without the use of a video capture card. Without out it though, the rest of this is still possible, the video output would just be on another screen.
Has anyone thought of this before or tried? I am tempted to start on it myself, just figured I'd see if anyone has any useful info on interfacing with an NES.
This got me thinking, what if the same could be done for the NES? Possibly even a PCI card or USB. The idea would be to have a PCI card in a modern day Computer that could allow a person to run NES games through an application that communicates directly with the hardware without the use of emulation. This would be a lot like a Development board used for the N64 in SGI computers. A Cartridge slot could be added to one of the 5.25" Drive bays and the games could be loaded from there, or directly from the computer. Obviously for the computer loading aspect to work, it would need to emulate the different mappers, but other than that, everything would be running natively.
The planned approach would be to use an FPGA-PCI board with address lines connected to an NES board and attempt to have it communicate directly with the system. Easiest approach may be to replace the NES CPU altogether since all the opcodes on a 6502/6510 are well documented, and all the hardware on the NES connects to it. This would allow for some rather interesting possibilities in terms of being able to address more memory or operate at higher clock speeds.
I remember there was someone working on cloning the PPU of the NES to allow for RGB video without sacrificing a PlayChoice 10. The work from that could be used for capturing the video data from the hardware without the use of a video capture card. Without out it though, the rest of this is still possible, the video output would just be on another screen.
Has anyone thought of this before or tried? I am tempted to start on it myself, just figured I'd see if anyone has any useful info on interfacing with an NES.