[SpookyZalost]

Crossposted over at the coffee house.

So it's not really been talked about too much but with awesome fpga based mini consoles like the mega sg available I've started thinking... What would happen if people could get an fpga expansion card to simulate hardware for backwards compatibility purposes.

For example, what if instead of running an emulator, you loaded a mega drive/ genesis core and used an app to load the rom as a cartridge and link it to the fpga.

Crazy I know, or better yet, loading an Amiga core and booting into the simulated Amiga while sharing the drives and such through a kind of passthrough.

What got me considering this was two very real systems back in the day.  The Ibm 286/mega drive/mega cd Sega terradrive and the pioneer laseractive which has a genesis expansion module.  Both used an expansion card of some sort which did passthrough to output stuff effectively having an integrated 2 in 1 setup.

Now I know it's kinda crazy but with how Linux allows dual video cards to have one be passed through to a VM it's not the craziest idea either.

There's also a ton of advantages if it works, like how modern bus speeds are faster than entire systems back in the day.

Just an idea though.