This is something I wanted to do for a while. In theory I have all the parts I need now (took forever to get them), but setting it all up would be a fair bit of work, and I'm not sure the cable I have will work. If not, ugh.

In RAM you can see two tables that IIRC both need to be intact. One has all the ROM names in full: "POKEMON RED" "POKEMON BLUE" "POKEMON YELLOW" etc. The other is shortened: "POKEMON" "RED" "BLUE" "YELLOW" etc.

The ROMs are 1MB each so they certainly wouldn't be in the 4MB of available RAM when not needed. They'd either be stored in ROM or read from the cartridge.
I took a quick look at the ROM and saw no sign of them, but that only says they're not there in an uncompressed format.

Stadium 2 had some features (load on demand) and limitations (lack of colour support in turbo mode which sucked) that suggested it was streaming from the controller, though that doesn't guarantee S1 was doing the same. G/S/C were designed with this in mind, while R/B/Y weren't, and G/S/C's code is far cleaner and more efficient, so they could certainly have been designed to help reduce the transfer time and the amount that actually needed to be loaded.

There are of course some theories that could apply when it comes to reducing load time. IIRC you couldn't skip the first few seconds of the opening on N64, so the game could still have been loading at that point (grab the stuff necessary for the opening screens first, load the rest while that plays) or it could even have been a well-synced movie.
Gen2 also had a nice script system; it could be possible the N64 games high-level-emulated it all, just pulling the necessary data from the cartridge but running a native version of the game engine. Gen1 couldn't have done this though, especially since it accurately emulated all the glitches and crashes. I'm also told Gen1 had no script engine and had events all programmed in assembly, but I never looked at that.

This is one of those hacks I wish someone had done back when I actually played the games. Now that I can emulate them at like 20x speed on a PC, it's not as cool... but I'd still like to do it sometime. (I'm also very interested in using that cartridge adaptor in homebrew code...)

There is apparently a plugin for some emulators that emulates this feature, so it'd be a good place to look for insight on how the hardware works. Of course, I could never get the plugin working to use it in hacking...



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