Today, let's take a nostalgic trip down memory lane with a little "What if...?" scenario. Remember the Sega 32X? It was this ambitious add-on for the Sega Genesis that aimed to catapult the beloved console into next-gen territory. While it didn't quite hit its mark, it left us wondering: what other classic consoles could have benefited from a similar leap forward?
Let's imagine—what if the N64 had gotten an "N128" upgrade? Could it have kept up with the PS1 and Saturn in that fierce console war era? Or maybe there’s another platform itching for a second wind, like the SNES or even the beloved Game Boy!
What other consoles do you think should've received their own "next-gen" add-ons?
Ah yeah, you can say the same about the Saturn's RAM pack. The thing for me is the 32X was hyped as making the Genesis a "next-gen". If you look how it works, it's not too far from what I would consider the truth. With the 32X plugged in, the Genesis is more or less a display-device for the 32X, and things that would be in no way possible, like having Virtua Fighter on Genesis, it feels a lot more impressive than the N64 + expansion pack, which mostly unlocked better textures.
Yeah, I don't think I can recall anything else like the 32X. Like you said, it was basically a standalone system that used the Genesis for all of its I/O (didn't it also need its own power cable, too, rather than drawing from the cartridge slot on the Genesis?)
I think the closest we got, aside from the memory expansions, were things like the SuperFX chip in some SNES games. StarFox and a few other games used those, and it did some co-processing inside the cartridge. It didn't turn the SNES into an N64, but it did allow it do more things than it was originally designed to do.
Makes sense. From the breadboard computer building side, it is easy to build a basic computer with anything like a Z80, 6502, or 68k. It is much more of a pain to interface with video and to a much lesser extent I/O.
It probably would have been more interesting if the video and I/O were designed as an independent system with a rear inserted SBC-like cartridge that housed the principal processor and memory. Like what if our first consoles were still relevant, and only the controllers had really evolved? Assuming that these could have survived the intermediate era of disc media data density into the era of high density flash memory, we might still be using cartridges. The NVME is basically a game cartridge analog.