Brand new Doom for... SNES?

[A Black Falcon]

On the Super FX 3 running on an FPGA chip, apparently that was not done here for cost reasons -- putting a FPGA powerful enough to emulate the chip into the Doom remake cart would have cost significantly more than the Pi chip they used instead cost.  Paying for that for one game wouldn't have made sense, they decided.

As for Shantae, how can you be sure that the chips were taken from old GBA games?  I mean, they could have been, but FRAM chips mostly weren't used in cheap GBA games, right?  It was mostly later, higher-end titles.  In that article you link the LR person says that the FRAM chips were new old stock and that's why they were in that condition.  We can't be sure which story is true... but also, I imagine those chips were used in things other than GBA games, yes?  They don't have to have come out of old GBA carts... not that it didn't happen, but it isn't the only explanation that makes sense.

What LR COULD do is use one of the MANY knockoff chips being produced right now to make replicas of GBA pokemon games, and just a ROM or FLASH chip in there, depending on design.  It's a rather disappointing corner cutting measure they've gone into which is frankly worse than when they reprinted some games on CD-R, a format known to degrade in the span of 5 years or so.

Using real FRAM chips seems like the opposite of a cost-cutting measure to me, wouldn't those be not so cheap?

LR definitely has made some mistakes, no question about it.  The CDR thing is indefensible.  Calling their Switch (and probably also retro) releases "forever physical" when those things are on flash chips that probably have a lifespan of decades and not the very long lifespans of classic masked ROMs is also deceptive.  But I'm not sure if this is one of those things.