So I've been on holiday travelling around France for the last month or so, and lemmie say that coming back to a worklog this awesome really makes up for all the terrible weather I've had to suffer through. Add to that I've been thinking about the feasibility of doing just this exact thing. I'm late to the party here, or perhaps it somehow slipped my notice when I joined the boards.
As fate would have it I was talking with someone a few months ago who had a working prototype board (might have been you marshalh on a different forum?). You mentioned you were having issues with the bootloader - was that on the FPGA? This was the solution the other person I was taking with had - and please forgive me for not remembering their name! That PIF chip really is a pain in the ass, and talking with Zoinkity about it a year ago or so he was musing on replacing the chip with something else. Assuming the FPGA has taken over the security handling it'd only leave the cryptic controller saving functions left to be handled.
It'd be awesome to really "clear the junk" on the N64 board, and get rid of many of the unnecessary components - I'd also love to see a replacement RCP one day with just a little more grunt than the original, especially given the HD codes that are being created now
