One of the remarkable characteristics of the Super Nintendo was the ability for game cartridges (cart) to pack more than instructions and assets into ROM chips. If we open and look at the PCBs, we can find inside things like the CIC copy protection chip, SRAM, and even “enhancement processors”.
↫ Fabien Sanglard
When I was a child and teenager in the ’90s, the capabilities of the SNES cartridge were a bit of a legend. We’d talk about what certain games would use which additional processors and chips in the cartridge, right or wrong, often boasting about the games we owned, and talking down the games we didn’t. Much of it was probably nonsense, but there’s some good memories there.
We’re decades deep into the internet age now, and all the mysteries of the SNES cartridge can just be looked up on Wikipedia and endless numbers of other websites. The mystery’s all gone, but at least now we can accurately marvel at just how versatile the SNES really was.
I understand. 🙂 But I love how that now allows me to learn even DEEPER stuff now! For example, I watched a video explaining how random number generation was done is games like Final Fantasy (NES) and Tetris (Game Boy). It was fascinating. Or, being able to see the entire source code for Metroid (NES), decompiled and commented. It was the game that made me want to become a programmer and make games myself.
RNG on the NES is something I’d be interested reading more about. I had a weird experience with the Jeopardy! game for the NES. I had played the game to death, memorizing basically every answer in the game. One time I brought it to a friend’s house (He had the NES 2) and I started seeing game boards that I had never seen on my console. Somehow, for my particular NES, something was preventing it from accessing the full list of game boards.
I love how in these times people appreciate SNES. In my little slilce of life at the time it was new, it was very much frowned upon. All of my friends dove into Sega Genesis. All the arguments were super lame, speed of rendering sprites, number of colors, the gore factor of games.
The way it is phrased implies that SNES carts were the only ones that could have extra hardware. But this is false, as Interton VC 4000 games were already including extra RAM and I/O ports on the cart back in the 1970s.,
It is kinda phrased like that. The NES had a long history of enhancement chips. The Sega Genesis had one chip, the SVP, used in precisely one game (Virtual Racer). For the NES, most games released after 1988 (perhaps even earlier) had mapper chips, primarily to expand the amount of ROM available to the NES, but also to sometimes add extra features