Comment by Shakahs
7 years ago
TLDR: Some NES game cartridges contained coprocessors. The Pilotwings math coprocessor had 3 revisions and one of them produces slightly different outputs, even though the game ROM is identical.
Star Fox had a 2D/3D chip called Super FX that sounds a lot like a GPU. It’s pretty cool that console games of that era could augment your existing hardware to support their requirements.
The most hilarious enhancement chip is the SA-1, used in the Super Mario RPG and other games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_...
It's essentially the same exact chip as the SNES's main CPU. Except three times faster.
Imagine buying a game for your 3ghz PC that ships on a flash drive. And that flash drive also contains a 9hz (edit: whoops, 9ghz, haha) Intel Core i9 CPU.
This was almost a thing with Xeon Phi... 57 CPU cores for 2 slots...
They could do that because the SNES's main CPU was ridiculously pokey even for the time it was released. Even calling it 16-bit was a bit of a white lie.
A 9hz microprocessor would indeed be something. Start the game up, come back 10 days later and one frame would almost be rendered...
It might even be longer than that... I wonder how long it would take to render one frame of a modern game by hand if everyone on the planet joined in (let's make it easy and render at 160x120).
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Never had that centered Nintendo logo been a bigger disappointment.
Not just back then. Nintendo has put a lot of wacky stuff in cartridges. Learn with Pokemon Typing Adventure had a bluetooth adapter in its cartridge to communicate with its bundled bluetooth keyboard. Some early NES games were actually Famicom boards with a 60 to 72 pin adapter embedded in the cartridge. Morita Shogi 64 had a modem and a phone jack built into its cartridge. Animal Crossing for N64 had a real-time clock. Mario Artist: Talent Studio had a cartridge that featured an entire composite video capture card. The Japanese version of Tetris 64 had a modified controller pak which connected to an infrared heartrate sensor for a special play mode that tested the user's ability to keep calm.
More examples: WarioWare: Twisted! for Game Boy Advance with a gyroscope sensor, and Boktai: The Sun Is in Your Hand (also for GBA) with a light sensor for detecting sunlight.
Pokemon: HeartGold/SoulSilver have an infrared comms port to communicate with the pokewalker, and to mystery gift - because the Game Boy Color had one!
Small correction, these are SNES games. The extra chips on NES games were primarily memory mappers and not as interesting as what SNES games did.
Even though the NES chips were still called "mappers" some of the later chips did a lot more, particularly on the Famicom, where cartridges could add extra sound channels. Even on the NES though you saw some minor graphics enhancements.