Discussion: Hardware decoder with parallel random access?

[Amaroq-Clearwater]

I'm working on some homebrew development for old, cartridge-based game systems, and I was looking into different compression algorithms, at first trying to see if I could combine features from LZW (especially random access), LZMA, LZSS/DEFLATE, and JPEG's Arithmetic Compression… Then I discovered LZHAM.

I don't know if LZHAM is capable of random access, but I am definitely enamored by its immense compression ratios and blistering fast decoding speed. But since I am working with cartridges, that gives me an opportunity: what if we could develop an application-specific integrated circuit for real-time decoding of LZHAM-compressed data on vintage gaming hardware, complete with parallel random access? I’m not very experienced with hardware design, so if anybody has thoughts on this, then I would love to hear about it.

I would like to point out that for encoding, an FPGA might be better suited than an ASIC (though I’m not sure what exactly you’d be encoding during gameplay). But I’d be extremely happy to be proven wrong!