Cartridges also have the disadvantage that they do not support I/O ports. Memory mapped I/O is more problematic to emulate (unless it is somehow hacked into the existing SD card interface), and it would be slower to read in a modified version of midiplay, because paging needs to be saved, changed and restored in a high frequency IRQ handler. Assuming it is based on the 6850, input could be implemented better if the interface supported generating interrupts, otherwise the 6850 needs to be polled at a fixed high frequency, which does work, but uses more CPU time. With a VHDL implementation of the 6850, a minor optimization would be possible by making the data register return FFh when no new data byte is available.
Does anyone have a photo of the bottom side of the interface PCB ?
Do you have a photo of the top side with removed ROM ?
Being a new project, changing the pagination(and the MIDI.Rom code) to segment 06, the two devices(Midi+SD reader) can live together on the same cartridge.