this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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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.
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.
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
https://gamegenie.codes/snes/super-mario-rpg-legend-of-the-seven-stars/
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.
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.