he's discussed both a base unit and a cartridge unit. The point is he's building it to work with most of the limitations of the SNES, this isn't a Sega 32X, it's just making possible CD quality audio and FMVs, as well as the ability to soft patch real carts (there isn't really any benefit in doing this over using a flash cart except that it's pretty damn cool, playing your romhacks on your actual carts)
I'm excited, and while who knows if it will ever happen, I'll buy the hardware if someone makes it, and it sounds like they are working on it.
he also explains a lot of this in his article
What the SNES was truly capable of
If you look at the S-DD1 (Star Ocean) and the SPC7110 (Far East of Eden Zero), you will see two games that use memory-mapped controllers to page in more ROM space than their address ranges permitted. What 21fx does is simply extend the possible range from 4MB to 4GB.....
Now look at the Super Game Boy. It connects to the SNES cartridge connector's audio output pins to stream the Game Boy audio at 2.147MHz, which is then mixed with the SNES' S-DSP output.
Another example is the Broadcast Satellaview, which connects to the SNES' base connector, and streams CD-quality audio transmitted over satellite. 21fx works on the exact same principle, but also waits for a ready state, once again allowing virtually any storage medium, regardless of its latency, to work.
21fx is an extension, not a special chip
The protocol was designed to be as flexible as possible, so that virtually any configuration is possible. 21fx can be created as a base unit connector (ala the Broadcast Satellaview), as a cartridge passthru (ala the Game Genie), or as a flash cartridge (ala the SNES PowerPak)......
....The device itself really just needs a connector, an SD card slot, and an FPGA or MCU capable of implementing the equivalent of ~2kb of C source code across three registers.
....Imagine if you will, Chrono Trigger for the SNES, with CD-quality audio of your choice. Perhaps one of the various remixed CDs released. And with all of the full-motion video from the PSX version. All with zero seek times. And on real hardware or on emulators. Or imagine an entirely new game, no longer bound to an arbitrary 4MB ROM size. All the levels you want, all the graphics you want, all the music you want.
One goal is to attract the attention of ROM hackers to create UPS patches that make extremely minor changes to games, which will enable 21fx support, while still providing full backwards-compatibility for non-21fx hardware and emulators.
Although like romhacks, these things take time, and may just never happen.
One thing he did say though was that no one is going to care or use it unless there are cool hacks for it. I think he is doing Der Langrisser but is anyone else going to step up and make hacks utilizing it? I can't hack for shit on the SNES but isn't there any hackers out there that are interested in this?
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