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ASFAIK, the NES would be the hardest system to do something like this on because of the amount of mappers. It *is* possible though to have different cartridge PCBs for each system, with another board containing a reprogramable FPGA to do mapping/logic/etc and a storage device (CF, SD, IDE, etc). It ...

Stil depending on system. You'd need to make a.) a cart with only one mapper supported. (easiest) b.) hard method use an fpga to emulate mapper chips.

edit: and it could only do one system. Period.

I don't understand how a microcontroller couldn't be programmed to do the mapping in code loaded ...

So which way are we going, load roms on SD card, plug into magic thing that makes it into a cartridge and into the system and run it on the system?

Yes, not just game ROMs, but any code executable on the particular game console. And the "magic" accomplished by the flash-to-ROM emulation hardware ...

The concept:

Sounds like putting roms on a USB drive.

Yes, that's basically what I'm talking about. Or on an SD flash card. Both are dirt cheap and their contents are easily modified by a PC. With a universal interface instead of the custom ones that are currently sold, you'd have a very cheap route to a ...

It's called a "computer". ;)

Seriously, this sounds like quite the undertaking. Not only do you have to find a CPU powerful enough to handle all the systems you want to do (and necessary video and audio hardware), but you also have to do all the code: USB and SD decoding, code interpretation, and ...

This would be a neat project. Is this practical and has anyone done this?

Universal classic console ROM emulator:

The small controller PCB would contain a microcontroller, on-board RAM to act as storage for the code to be executed as a ROM, and a powered USB port. Code to be executed would be ...