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Imagine a timeline in which we have a Dreamcast 5 competing with PS5, etc.
I could cry over what might’ve been.
Dreamcast 5 competing with Atari 18200
I think the coolest part of this era was the ICs were developing so fast that in a short amount of time there were more powerful chips on the fucking cartridges than in the base system, so as new games came out they extended the capabilities more and more.
Things you just categorically could not do with a game running from a disc instead of a cartridge, BTW.
It did make the cartridges more expensive than the ones without the enhanced chips, which stunk. You could have multiple SuperFX games on SNES and you had to pay for similar / same added hardware several times over.
I’d still take those special carts than not have them at all but just offering a counterpoint. Cartridges were expensive especially when you adjust for inflation.
but in addition to the capacity expanding add ons inside the cart… you also had virtually no load times.
I wish the advent of large scale flash storage would herald the return of carts, since they can be even bigger than blu-rays now, and on top of that all the crazy stuff you could do with them.
I miss sticking carts in carts.
i miss consoles that you could add other consoles to.
I miss the weird, wacky ingeniusness of it all.
Now consoles are just desktop PCs with DRM.
Cartridges were awesome and should come back. They gave you something fun to collect too. You could see all your games
When you think about it, it’s not much weirder than plugging a GPU into a PC. It has a more powerful processor and requires it’s own power supply. Imagine having to plug in your SNES cartridge.
Except GPUs dont have game ROMs on them. Maybe someday they will.
there were more powerful chips on the fucking cartridges than in the base system
The SA-1chip is an insane thing to exist.
Some engineer(presumably on a coke binge): What if we just took the whole SNES CPU and put a second one in the cartridge.
Mad scientist: Make the one in the cartridge run 4 times faster.
It’s not mad science, it was a natural development. Today a GPU is a computationally powerful add-on that is installed into computers. Plugging a more powerful co-processor doesn’t make too much sense though.
Frequencies back then were also low enough to tolerate more common shenanigans. Accessing on-board or off-board memory didn’t really make a difference etc.
I didn’t know Xzibit worked for Nintendo.
All I remember was that there were zero Game Genie codes for Super Mario RPG because that cart used so much custom hardware the Game Genie didn’t know how to interface with it.
game genie doesnt interface with it. it simply edits values in the system ram. It doesnt matter whats in the cart, the system ram isnt gonna change
I remember the first officially modded game I played, the Sonic and Knuckles cartridge for the Genesis.
Yes, just putting any game I had in to see if something happened.
you forgot the game genie and the… was it sonic 2 or 3 that flipped open and let you add to the stack?
Sonic and Knuckles let you human centipede it with Sonic 2/3
Sonic and knuckles addon
I had the cdx with the 32x on it. Supposedly you weren’t supposed to do that for some FCC rule, but it worked.
Don’t forget Sega channel.
And the Power Base Converter. I don’t think that will pass through the 32x, though. I’ll have to dig mine out and try it some time.
I’ll save you some time with digging, it does not. Master System games will not pass through the 32X. sorry kids, the “Sega Tower of Power” is just a neat visual, it actually doesn’t work.
just shove sonic and knuckles up there and call it a day
This kills the SEGA.
Seriously, the infighting and cannibalized sales between the 32X and the Saturn are a big reason why SEGA doesn’t make consoles anymore.
Yeah. It’s really was the beginning of the end. So many fans felt taken advantage of. I got the Saturn and it was great but the releases between them all were too close and too much.
The Saturn’s terrible marketing campaign, 100 dollar higher price tag (than PS1) and inferior technology were the undoing of Sega, but you’re right. They needed to slow down. Could have waited to take on Nintendo again with their N64 rather than the new guy PlayStation.
Not to mention the richer video the sega CD was capable of showing encouraged most games for it to pretty much just be choose your own adventure movies (from what I’ve heard, since I grew up on the Nintendo side of that deadly console war). Those “games” IMO are the poster child of games that focus all on graphics at the expense of gameplay, though they can be really rich in story. If younger me had gotten one of those, my disappointment would have been severe.
Also don’t forget that they released the Dreamcast in the midst of all that, too.
And the Sega CDX console could be used as a portable CD player.
Edit: forgot the X
That’s only the rare CDX. Neat little device though.
I’ve still got mine but haven’t been able to find replacement cables for it. So sad.
I had a Coleco Adam which was basically something like this that turned the Coleco into a complete computer instead of just a game console. God I would love something like that for my PS5.
Some magazines said that is same as a Saturn.
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