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Game Gear TV tuner drives the LCD directly, cartslot becomes passthrough directly to the LCD interface. I imagine similar thing is possible here too.

That actually sounds plausible, I always wondered what it was as a kid too. Though I never saw any cart explicitly tell their size (though on the PCBs you often saw the Mbit sizes of the chips).

Do controllers work properly in both controller ports ? Many MD models develop cracked solders at the controller ports, causing all sort of headache...

So what are you decerning the values of the 3 caps are that I didn't label? Your paint writing is kinda hard for me to read and I don't want to make assumptions. It looks like 10nf or is that 10uf on the 2 polarized ones? The polarized ones are 10µF 16V tantalums. The little grey one I left unmarke...

This should be accurate

Usually green parts with such shape are inductors.

Alliance makes new 5V 2MByte sized parts but they are pretty expensive for the time being.

48KB is max size without mappers on SMS. For anything bigger the game will have to use one (perhaps the standard SMS mapper that most games use) but the game itself needs to be hacked to support that and that probably is not trivial by any means.

I have actually found that "cough" giving a nice percussive quality to the noise rather than just a hiss like TI PSG which has a much "mellower" and "steadier" noise quality. 6.6667% duty cycle it produces when feedback is disabled is a problem for music since it isn't exactly some octaves different...

It now dawned to me that it could be "table for the pattern generator" or "table of the pattern generator", data for the hardware that generates patterns (or at least that's how it could work in my language anyway). This makes it make sense for me, while the data way of thinking makes me think how a...

As a hardware orientated person, seeing data as the "generator" makes no sense, it is the hardware that generates the output using data supplied. "generation table" would make a whole lot more sense, hardware generates output using the input that guides generation of that output.

The "generator" part never made sense to me, it just refers to graphics/tiles or perhaps VRAM as whole... only generator is the video pipeline itself of which you have no direct control over... tiles -> tilemap -> video output generator.

MD documentation uses "Pattern name table" in particular not just "name table". in my early stuff I called the tilemaps "pattern tables", the "name" part never stuck to me. I'm not sure when I began to call things tilemaps rather than whatever else the official documentation uses, I certainly find t...

To play GG games on a TV you're better off using one of the GG TV modifications on a GG itself. GG mode changes how controller input works and few other tidbits like NMI no longer is pause but communications interrupt instead and SMS hardware cannot do any of it, all of the SMS stuff needs to get re...

There are not many off the shelf sound chips, Lidanriq has pretty much nailed the options. Sawtooth is very easy to do on a FM chip, requiring only two operators to produce the all harmonics ramp that sawtooth has. Squarewave is also easy with same method, only difference being multiplication factor...