The Nintendo Game Processor was a custom built computer — complete with a keyboard & mouse — that was built with one specific purpose: to visually create your own Super Nintendo games, via drag and drop, and write those games onto an actual SNES game cartridge.
Although the machine was never released, the planned architecture was really interesting: two parallel systems, one console-like which executed games natively and another where the development environment resided.
Sega did that for the Dreamcast : the Katana development kit
https://devkits.handheldmuseum.com/SegaDC_Katana.htm
https://www.retroreversing.com/Sega-Dreamcast-Katana-Development-Kit
https://segaretro.org/Dreamcast_Dev.Box
And Sony for the PSOne with the Net Yaroze.
These are just dev kits, the bigger item here is attempting “drag and drop” programming in 1994, which still isn’t very good today.
Scratch ?
First official release in 2007, and it looks like you’re heavily confined to the system. Doing anything else would be like trying to create Final Fantasy with Mario Maker.
Challenge !
This was really common at the time. In fact, in some form or other (though not always integrated) most console dev kits are custom nearly-retail-but-with-some-extra-bits console hardware hooked up (in some way) to a generic PC. Some dev kits had the PC bundled in the hardware
Amstrad MegaPC comes to mind when reading about this. It was a Amstrad PC with a Sega Megadrive on a ISA card.
But the PC couldn’t do anything about the Genesis side.
Not really, but there was passthrough of video and sound through the monitor. You switched between the systems by opening the cartridge hatch on the front. Also with proper skills and a hauppage card, there was this guy on youtube that made the sega show the videogame card output into a windows 3.11 window.
Having a game console that was loaded by software, may have allowed for some non authorized copying of regular snes games, maybe. I know some of the games had differing amounts of memory requirements or special chips in the console.
I wonder if that was a contributing factor.
But Nintendo did lots of odd projects in that time frame. A company I used to work for had a collaboration with Nintendo with some custom hardware that never got released. It was really dumb. It would have cost a fortune for customers and provided a terrible experience. I’m really really surprised that it made its way into physical hardware.
Nintendo had a floppy disk drive that could have saved bucks from their traditional cartridge format, but they abandoned it due to piracy concerns. Their lock chip has been pretty clever since their NES era.
Actually Sega did that all the way back with the Genesis/MD with the MegaPC
That’s a different beast. The MegaPC wasn’t a developer machine for Sega systems, just a PC and a console bundled together.
The TeraDrive was used to develop Sega Games. Came out before the MegaPC, and most models seems to have had 286 intel processors.
Atari Jaguar development was originally done on an Atari TT or Falcon back in the day (from my understanding). So yeah bundling a computer with the dev hardware was fairly common. Hell, why not sell along your custom computer with custom console hardware?
Since these days the consoles are mostly just revamped AMD x86 architecture… not much point in this style of devkit.
Well, back in the 90’s early 2000’s you had to sign non competes/ ndas to get those dev kits, not sure if its that way now. Legal wouldn’t let us get one because of that, and we ended up suing Nintendo for violating a patent in one of their consoles ( we were basically laughed out of court as most of us expected) .