I'm a computer enthusiast from Croatia studying electronic business at Zagreb University of Applied Sciences. My field of interest is consuming and developing video games, software, music and art, and I would love to utilize that for my future enterpreneurship projects for Millennial nostalgia; specifically Windows XP era, Sony Ericsson featurephone era and SNES/GBA/PS1 game console era (1995-2005).
I'm trying to make my own multimedia device akin to the Sony Ericsson K510i/K610i/C510/W705 featurephones which had so much multimedia like Java apps (Opera Mini for web browsing, VibeJive for music composition, PaintCAD for pixelart, eBuddy for instant messaging for MSN/Facebook/ICQ/etc., MiniCommander for media reproduction, VideoDJ for video editing, etc.). Those Sony Ericssons don't exist anymore and Android phones have very bad memory management and don't provide good security or certainty; whether it's due to how you cannot pick up the phone without accidentally pressing something or due to how much privacy is being violated and many features being far more glitchy. I would love to make an embedded device that could be a phone, a media player, a game console or a portable computer, whether it's for home use or portable.
There have been many attempts at making a game console or a media device that can send a full frame without lag. I've had experience with ATMEGA328P and ATXMEGA128A1U, but despite the SPI, 8-bit bus bitbanging, external bus interface, etc., it was still impossible to render a full image while having some spare power to do other things because the CPU would either be bitbanging too much, the SPI would be slow, or the DMA would halt the CPU. ESP32 seemed like a good solution, but despite its 240MHz dual-core DSP CPU, the SPI is limited to 80MHz and the display I'm using is max 40MHz. And my calculations say that it's impossible to have a full frame of 320x240@60fps.
However, the ESP32 has a hardware Quad-SPI functionality with DMA-powered FIFO buffer which I could utilize if only I had a display with a Quad-SPI interface. Having had experience with a Geeetech board of VS1053 and soldering unused GPIO pins for Real-Time MIDI and having almost broken it by bad wiring (it produced creepy sounds) and then repairing it somehow, I remembered how awesome your products were/are and I decided to take a little look and I saw that you have an amazing video chip!
That's where I found your VS23S040 chip. It seems like an excellent solution! I would just like to know what features could be possible.
ESP32 has 520kB of internal RAM, external serial flash depending on development board, possible external serial RAM, and 240MHz of a dual-core DSP CPU. It's used for WiFi and Bluetooth and many IoT applications. My application currently is a game console/media player. There are also two more hardware SPI interfaces that can run up to 80MHz and have a DMA controlling them; they can be single wire, two wire, or four wire SPI (Quad-SPI).
If my calculations are correct, then if ESP32 could send a scanline buffer's 24-bit picture via Quad-SPI at 40MHz (I wish it could be 80MHz because ESP32 can do it) for a 320x240 resolution at 60FPS without halting the CPU during the DMA transactions, the used bandwidth would be 69.12% which is awesome! Alternatively, 50FPS could make it 57.6%. I already have the graphics engine in mind with prepared tilesets and nametables akin to NES/SNES as well as HDMA scrolling/bankswitching and other fancy effects which could easily render onto a new scanline buffer while the old one is being sent.
I would like to see if anyone has attempted to do this and where I could get a development board of VS23S040 and if that chip could be used as the serial RAM chip so that the ESP32 can map it onto its own address bus; or if that would halt the CPU, just use it as yet another SPI device.
Another feature I would like is one of your VS1000 chips to provide these features:
1. USB-to-USART interface (akin to Arduino's FTDI/CH chip) for programming ESP32.
2. Access to SD card, NAND Flash chip and another USB device so that both the VS and ESP can use those memories simultaneously.
3. USB Host so that the end users can use USB devices like keyboards, mice, joysticks and USB HID Serial devices so that my ESP32 can program another ESP32 (yay for selfsustainable computing!

4. Encoding, decoding and mixing WAV, OGG, Vorbis, Opus, MIDI (both as a file and real-time) and raw audio from my ESP32's I2S audio, on-board microphone and Line-In microphone which could all serve as background music in video games, sound effects on video games and user interfaces, media playing, audio processing for audio editing programs, audio recording, and possibly online game streaming. ESP32 is capable of producing and recording audio, so some of the processing power might be used by ESP32 if it's a stretch for VS. For example, VS could be playing real-time MIDI commands from my ESP32's commands while playing OGG voice clips for character dialogue and WAV for sound effects and the ESP32 could be playing in-game player voice clips recording the whole gameplay and streaming it to Twitch.
5. It has to be compliant with MIT license or Apache License 2.0 which I would love to use in my projects in order to have it Open Source / Open Hardware certified. This means there shouldn't be any MP3 or WMA patented/copyrighted material unless it is possible for the user to alternatively download those for non-commercial use.
6. Video processing and picture processing of free and open-source (MIT/BSD/Apache) codecs (Theora, PNG, BMP, JPG and possibly a custom format which I could program that could send a bit of JPG and a bit of OGG simultaneously). This should be possible to make my device a media player as well as a media recorder in case a camera is used and a media streamer for Twitch gaming Let's Plays.
Which VS chip could do this? How many of them could there be?
How much would all that cost to use with my NodeMCU? Do you have any development boards of these? How much would it cost for you to make a custom PCB with these components for me either physically or digitally so that a PCB assembly company in my country could do it to reduce shipping expenses since Croatia has recently got huge shipping issues?
I bet you've never seen anything as long as this before

So thank you for your time to read through all of this.
Best regards,
(Codename) RetroZvoc