Support RA on RealHardware using Everdrive N8 Pro and/or FKPAK PRO

[thaMANSTA]

• Seen lots of discussion about this over the years, and a few attempts, but hasn't happened yet it seems.
• the main blocking issue seems to be that reading memory addresses over the USB serial ports is too slow, as RA requires reading the ENTIRE contents of memory every single frame?
• I made a small script which calculates the minimum memory range needed to check for every cheevo in a set:
  Project status wendigojaeger/HardwareRetroAchievements#1 (comment)

Possible Solutions:

• Focused Memory Address Checks: an alternative memory-checking technique, which is more focused on checking the specific address required by the active RA cheevo set.
• this could be further optimized by only checking possible cheevos, based on completed cheevos, i.e. cheevo dependencies could be used to avoid checking some cheevos.
• Prerequisites: if you had a "1CC" cheevo, there is no reason to check this until you reach near end game (unless some glitches/skips are known).
• Cheevo Invalidation: Some of the complex checks could be avoided by marking them as invalidated, e.g. if you have a "1CC" cheevo, as soon as you lose a single life in the game, you could invalidate the "1CC" cheevo until a reset, and not bother checking the complex set of memory address necessary for such a check.

[wescopeland]

See: https://github.com/odelot/nes-ra-adapter.

[thaMANSTA]

That's cool! But I don't wish to (heavily) modify the consoles, given the investment in the Everdrives which have functionality which should be able to achieve this.

I also use an AV Famicom, and run Mac on an ARM64 M1 Mini, so that is a very specific solution that won't work for me! :). RA works on my Mac, but I would prefer to use real hardware.

The proof of concept for this was done a number of years ago, as you can see in link in my original post, the roadblock that @wendigojaeger ran into was that RA requires reading the entire memory space on every frame, it seems. But checking the entire memory address space on every frame doesn't seem necessary (or performant) if we use some context.

[wescopeland]

I understand. https://github.com/Factor-64/RA2Snes may also be of interest for reference.

Just dropping these links here to build up a body of knowledge / prior art.

[thaMANSTA]

I understand. https://github.com/Factor-64/RA2Snes may also be of interest for reference.

Just dropping these links here to build up a body of knowledge / prior art.

Thanks for the link! I will give that a try.