Seems to me that's very impractical, the mpeg slot shares the same a bus as the cartridge slot, with more direct access to the v bus. There would be issues with two-way (if even possible since it was clearly designed as an one way street for videos) real time 3d data transfer between that and the rest components (the PlayStation bus between components is faster and the system is still hindered by data congestion) unless it completely bypassed everything, did all cpu/2d/3d acceleration processing and fed the result to the vdp2 as a fully finished frame the vdp2 then displays as a fullscreen background without trying to bother with any back and forth communication with the rest components (so it would also have its own ram pools and its own vdp2 on top of that SH3 and mystery 3D DSP because in the Shenmue demos we do see it have 2D background layers in the same use cases as on a stock Saturn, unless, again, what we've seen is stock Saturn like Ishikawa said and the unseen extra hardware remake would look more like halfway between the Saturn and Dreamcast version, relying mostly on full 3D scenes and not 2D layers and tricks the Saturn needs). I dunno
Yeah, the idea of 'TRIP' being a plug-in to the Saturn the way 32X was for MegaDrive/Genesis does have me asking some questions. Because like you basically said, the cartridge port on Saturn wasn't really ideal for such a plug-in. I don't think the Saturn's CPUs had any way of directly addressing onboard components of the 'TRIP', and there was no dedicated manager for the SCU within the system.
From what I understand, the SH2s had memory addresses reserved for A-bus peripherals, but only in terms of treating them like external ROM (non-boot/BIOS) and RAM. So I guess what 'TRIP' would've done was handle/accelerate some of the graphics processing on its own, store results into onboard RAM, and then the Saturn would have one of the SH2s access data from that RAM by pointing to the address region where that RAM would be mapped in the SH2's memory space.
And for providing the 'TRIP' necessary data, it'd basically do the same thing. The actual benefit would be that the Saturn & 'TRIP' were processing different parts of the frame in parallel; Saturn could handle the front buffer(s) and the 'TRIP' handling back buffer(s), but in this context, the 'TRIP' assembling partial parts of frames and Saturn completing them.
That's assuming the 'TRIP' wasn't set up like the 32X where it had its own video out and games had to manually decide what layers the 'TRIP' was dedicated to, and syncing the outputs that way. Which was already seemingly difficult with the MegaDrive/32X; I imagine it'd of been a nightmare for Saturn/'TRIP' considering the increased difficulty in 3D rendering vs. 2D,
and Saturn already being more cumbersome to develop for than anything like the MegaDrive.
Tho, I haven't read the Beep 21 article yet; maybe there is deep insight into how 'TRIP' functioned contained in it.
Yeah but PC engine was first and foremost a Japan exclusive? Where as Sega CD was available world-wide
PC-Engine (the HuCard version) itself? That was Japan & America; a Europe (or at least partly Europe) launch was planned but never happened because it failed badly in America, and they were stuck with a warehouse of unsold systems after the initial American launch.
PC-Engine CD got an American release in the form of the TurboDuo, but it was limited to mail-only (& maybe some specialty shops) handled directly by Turbo Technologies (who took over for NEC America as a joint venture between NEC and Hudson Soft due to disappointment over Turbographx-16 market performance). That skipped Europe, too.
