@Dex Makes sense, I guess. It sure looks like it'd be possible to play on NES though!

@Felthry A NES version was apparently planned at some point going by the Wikipedia article, but they'd have needed some way of getting the new engine running on NES and the game was still far too big for standard NES carts.

@Dex Is it? It doesn't look like it'd be much bigger than other megaman games. I suppose it's not easy to tell though!

@Dex @Felthry

I thought NES carts could have variable sizes?

@Tathar @Dex Yes, but they need a specially-made memory mapper chip on the cartridge if they're over a certain size, and making custom silicon for NES games today is, well, very not worth it. Even an fpga or cpld solution would probably be more trouble than it's worth to develop.

@Felthry @Dex

Is this basically how extended memory works?

@Tathar @Dex You mean like in x86 contexts? I don't think so

@Felthry @Dex

Yeah, just the basic idea behind what himem.sys is doing though.

@Tathar @Dex the memory mapper is what does the bank switching, if you've heard that term.

@Felthry @Tathar yeah at the time of MM9’s release, FPGAs weren’t at the point they are today, and it would have been ridiculously expensive.

Now you can have SNES games with CD audio via the SD2SNES IIRC, so I assume someone would be able to make it work for a NES game the size of MM9 if the need was there.

@Dex @Tathar I feel like 2008 CPLDs would have sufficed for a memory mapper, it would just have been too expensive to be worth it

The SD2SNES isn't exactly cheap either.

@Dex @Tathar A memory mapper is not itself a complex device, unless you want to add extra features to it like the MMC5 had for example

you basically just have to translate memory addresses quickly, which is easily accomplished on a CPLD or FPGA--and if you had to, could be done with a fast enough (where fast enough means ~100 MHz, maybe even less) microcontroller, too, though that'd be a little obnoxious to work with