21fx Help Wanted
I am looking for a hardware engineer who is interested in helping to realize this device. I am willing to invest heavily in the project, requiring only a trusted person or prototype device as a pre-requisite for monetary compensation.
I have a few hundred dollars I'm willing to invest to get to an initial prototype. And once that is realized, I am willing to finance a production run of 50-200 units, depending on their cost. Probably somewhere in the $2,000 range would be my limit. I don't seek to make any profit on this, but if any proceeds were made, I'd be happy to send them along.
I'm also willing to consider a large initial payment for a prototype, so by all means, give me a quote and we'll see how things go.
I have designed the API to be as flexible as possible. The design itself will work as a base unit (connecting to the bottom of the SNES), as a cartridge passthru (connecting to the SNES cartridge slot, and intercepting only $21fx commands, passing the rest through a female cartridge connector on the top of the unit), and as a flash cart itself (holding the $21fx parsing logic right inside the flash cart.)
It is also designed to handle any latency. So it is possible to use anything from CD-ROMs, mechanical hard disks, solid state hard disks, SD media, Compact Flash media, a large pool of flash ROM, etc. The medium is read-only, but can be read-write easily if desired.
I'm not at all picky about the controller: whether it be CPLD, MLC or even FPGA, anything is fine by me; and I can assist in programming the device if desired.
My preferred design would be a cartridge passthru device, similar to a Game Genie, that takes an SD memory card. But I'm completely flexible. Realizing the device is more important than having it be absolutely ideal.
There have been countless flash cart devices for the SNES that do far more than the 21fx does, so it should not be a stretch to make this. The hardware itself looks like it would cost around $35-50 in parts once the prototype is ready and we can send it along.
If you're interested, or know anyone who would be, I can be reached at setsunakun0 at hotmail.com. Many thanks in advance.