ROM cartridges are cool. They have no loading times, they are a physical object you can buy and sell and trade and give away and collect, they have neat little labels and boxes and such, they come with paper manuals and sometimes posters and such.
That is why I want them to be so front and centre in Sentinel 65X -- I want you, the game dev, to be able to
easily self-publish a real, high quality, cartridge game, without needing anything more than a PayPal account and a Tindie account or the equivalents thereof.
Sentinel 65X cartridges can hold 8MB of flash ROM and/or RAM (combined) without bank swapping -- sky is the limit with banking. They can have memory-mapped I/O, they can add new audio capabilities, they can even shut down the main CPU and take over the whole system if you want -- yes, that means you don't even have to know 65816 coding, you can stick whatever CPU you like in there as long as you can make it talk on the bus properly.
They are physically and electrically, but not logically, compatible with Sega Mega Drive/Genesis carts. This means you can buy plastic shells for your cart PCB off the shelf, along with those fancy MD/Genesis shelf boxes.
And yes, we will have an SD port, and a default system/OS for people to use. Hell yes, that's awesome too. But you won't be
restricted by that -- you will be allowed and encouraged to do what
you feel is right for
your game.
And for non-game retro types who want to tinker, we have goodies for you too. RAM expansions for the cartridge port, and an expansion backplane that turns the mainboard into a microATX-compatible that you can slot into whatever case you want. If someone wants to make secondary mass storage solutions for that, I think that's awesome.
And all of this, all of it, will be
certified Open Source Hardware and Software. No royalties, no limitations, just you and your creativity and drive. If I happen to make a little money selling stuff to enable your ideas, I'm happy with that, but the
purpose is to make this thing exist so people can
use it.
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Sentinel65X