Really cool. I'm wondering: what background did you need to be able to think of the question that resulted in this project?

I know you said you're involved in some retrogaming and were experimenting, but as someone who works in a world where hardware is pretty heavily abstracted away, even if I got into retrogaming I don't know that I'd consider that there may be a systems improvement lying around. Beyond the creative aspect, it feels like there is some systems and hardware background that helped put the idea together (and I'd be interested to go learn about of that systems/hardware knowledge myself).

I wonder too, DMA plays a huge role in most older gaming consoles when the CPUs were far more sluggish.

Perhaps that's what made them think to try.

Perhaps the current batch of smart memory cards which on the PS2 I believe have quite complex DMA capabilities to stream from the SD card game data.