His argument about power was OK, but I'm still wondering if is there any way to cut off the circuit to unmapped ROMS in a board via an intelligent mapper package. Aside from warm-up times (is this even significant on mask ROMs?) and some weird amperage variation during "switches" I don't see why it cannot be possible. Then again my electronics experience is very limited.
Where there's a will, there's usually a way ... but you'd be dramatically complicating the circuitry in order to get that power saving.
Easier just to ship this crazy mythical monster cartridge with its own power supply.
Some buffer chips could take care of the capacitive loading on the PCE's cartridge bus, and then it would probably just be a case of using enough of the right ROM chips (the largest N64 64MB cartridges were 64MB), and providing an 8-bit upper-bank-select instead of the 2-bit upper-bank-select on the SFII HuCard.
I suspect that it
could be done ... but it would be totally uncommercial and insane.
But that wasn't really the point from what I see ... everyone here was just arguing that there's no major conceptual difference between HuCard games and CD games ... which is absolutely correct from my POV, it's all just memory, and the difference is only a case of how much of it you have access to at one time.
Artabasdos was sprouting nonsense about seek-times on larger memory, stuff about flash memory, and SD cards, that all have absolutely nothing to do with how the PCE hardware actually works.
