this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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There's multiple consoles which were nothing but a display and controller adapter for the cartridge which needed to have all the smarts
And in the middle to end of the Gameboy Color era and Gameboy Advance era most game cartridges had extra processing power internally.
Do you have any link regarding this? I knew of this kind of trick for NES, SNES and Mega Drive games, but other than memory swapping in the GB, I had no idea there was any additional computing trick?
I don't think there was anything beyond SRAM for save games for the GB/GBA. There was a number of cartridges with sensors or rumble packs but I can't find any details about extra computational power on the cartridges.
I would also be interested if there's some exceptions that I didn't know about.
I guess the real time clock on Pokémon games is technically extra computational power 🤓
https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/2024/02/every-epoch-cassette-vision-game-preserved-and-emulated/
After looking closer it looks like the Gameboy ones with CPU were mostly unofficial like media player cartridges