So I was wondering about the everdriveN8 and how its unable to play the larger games due to the limits on PRG and CHR.
I'm not gonna lie, I know little about its construction but would it be able to personally modify the cart to be able to play those titles or is it as I'm assuming and much more involved than that?
Thanks!
Let me see... in addition to replacing the memory chips for larger ones, you'd have to make sure the FPGA has enough pins left to control the new address lines. Then, after the hardware modifications, you'd have to create the mapper files for these big games, and possibly modify the existing mappers to account for the extra address lines as well.
I'd say this is complicated as hell unless you have the equipment to desolder/solder the memory chips, and experience working with FPGAs.
What games larger than 512 PRG + 512 CHR do you consider worth playing anyway? I'm not aware of any good games larger than that. What actually bothers me about this limitation is that it prevents developers from experimenting with unusual stuff, such as FMVs and/or long PCM audio tracks. But then again, those are just novelties, not really worth increasing the prices of the flash carts.
Tangent:
I think the best workaround for those funny oversize ideas would be to define a mapper with abstracted access to some serial bytestream ... abstracted away from the underlying storage method used on the flashcart.
For streaming audio from DPCM, one of the funny ideas that occured to me was to map a deserialized read port (like INL's RAM+microcontroller+serial EEPROM idea) from $E000-$EFFF. Set the DPCM to loop in that window and it'll just endlessly consume bytes at 4KiB/sec, streaming audio forever.