u/Front_Management_989

An update and a question for you guys.

The update : I am struggling with the cd music. Lots of bugs, timing & memory issues. The rest seems to work fine. Hucards play fine, but that's not the point of the device. CD games play fine without the CD tracks but lots of instability when I add the music. I am using the equivalent of a pico 2 to run the board but I am thinking I might need to use an FPGA instead.

The question : On the mono vs stereo output, do you think you would actually hear the difference (as of today, playing cd games from the hucard connector limits the sound output to mono)? On what kind of setup do you play your original consoles ? I play them on a CRT with integrated speakers (also called .. a TV lol). There is a trick that would theoretically allow to get stereo out of the hucard, but at the cost of some quality loss, so I'm wondering how important is stereo & sound fidelity in your playing experience today.

Thanks for your feedbacks.

https://preview.redd.it/jpo6rgpuzxih1.png?width=1068&format=png&auto=webp&s=2a1ddc889966fcae3dc62b75a126e9d784b40b42

I am working on a Hucard that would run CD games on a CD-equiped console (i.e. DUO, DUO-R, Super CDROM2, IFU-30..).

As of this morning I can boot and partially run games. Without any modification on the console : that's my #1 goal - no console mod.

The story behind it : big fan of the Nec consoles, after creating the Chronos Project for the PC Engine Mini, I got my dream console, the DUO, and couldn't play any CD-R burnt game. So I went on a mission to learn electronics and hardware and started a project to build a true Optical Unit Emulator, one that wouldn't require any soldering or destructive mod on the console, only to unplug the 3 connectors of the optical block and plug the device instead. I made excellent progress, but fried one of the console's chip during the dev tests (the RF amp - CXA1081) ... and didn't have a choice at that point but to have cd games launched through the Hucard slot.

So here we are. To my knowledge such a solution doesn't exist yet - one that would play CD games from a Hucard, on DUO type consoles, so I would have to make one :) . Known future limitations so far:

- sound will be limited to mono, as stereo has to come from the cd player

- some games will not be compatible with my solution, but at this point I haven't established yet which ones. I don't expect that number to be high, though.

So that's my summer projects. Stay tuned for updates. This is a personal research & fun project.