serialviz VS PicoCart64

For my simple app, one-line calls to ESBuild in package.json seem good enough. I run everything using 'npm run dev' or 'npm run build'. See [1].

I suppose it wouldn't scale if the app got too big and complicated.

[1] https://github.com/skybrian/serialviz/blob/main/package.json

Nice! Looks like the protocol between the Pico and the Windows software is quite simple. Porting it to another OS shouldn't too hard.

Here's an unusual approach to portability for this kind of software: since Chrome supports Web Serial, a web app could do the UI and then it would be portable across operating systems (though still Chromium specific) with no software to install (assuming you already have Chrome or Edge).

Along those lines, I wrote a little web app that plots CSV data from a microcontroller board (which happens to be a Pico). There's not a lot to it, but I like it better than the Arduino plotter and it might be useful as an example:

https://github.com/skybrian/serialviz

There's an open source effort to build one with a Pi Pico: https://github.com/kbeckmann/PicoCart64/tree/develop

I have no clue how tested it is, and README mentions only up to 2MB ROMs, but it is a start.

The main idea is to make the cartridge as simple and cheap as possible. Contrary to Konrad's idea of multiplexed PSRAM chips and two RP2040, I decided to use one SPI flash memory chip and one RP2040. Modern flash chips allow to erase and flash data more than 100,000 times, which is more than enough for home use for many years. Since the RP2040 does not support SPI flash chips larger than 16MB, it was decided to use page mode with page switching through the Extended Address register (EA register).

PicoCart64: Nintendo 64 flash cart using a Raspberry Pi RP2040\ (30 comments)