/vr/ - Retro Games

>>1918152
>Would it be possible to make an emulation card?

In theory, yes. There was a 3do Blaster PCI card back in the day that allowed a fast PC to play 3do games. There was also the Amstrad Mega PC which was a normal 386 with a Megadrive ISA cart.

In practice, it would be very difficult due to the huge layers of API that modern PCs have in order to provide compatibility to the widest array of hardware. You'd also need a huge bridge chip that would be handling controller I/O, memory card storages, or even just the graphics output (old console graphic chips usually output analog rgb, and fed that into a composite encoder - you need to translate that to something the PC could read).

With CD based consoles you also have additional difficulties getting drive I/o working.

If you are capable of fixing all of those, AND you have the funds to create such parts, then at that point you are better off making SD Card loaders for the real consoles.

Especially since many of the parts that those old consoles used may not be available en masse, or they are priced at a level that such an emulation card would cost 1-200$ in materials alone, not counting the amount of work hours you put in creating one.