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One of the most inventive, brilliant, and interesting cartridges to come out of the 90's was Star Fox for the Super Nintendo. Star Fox featured a co-processor chip, the Super FX, that was effectively a GPU used to draw polygons in the frame buffer.
Without this, Star Fox wouldn’t be 3D, Yoshi’s Island wouldn’t be as cute, and there wouldn’t be an always-on processor in your computer with the potential to spy on everything you do.
The Super FX chip, the Capcom-developed Cx4 co-processor, and the Nintendo DSP all lived in a cartridge, but the technology to put a better computer in a cartridge never made it to Nintendo’s handheld devices. Cheap, powerful micro-controllers are everywhere now, and it’s not that hard to make a board with card edge connectors, leading Anders to build a Super FX for the Game Boy Color.
https://hackaday.com/2016/11/09/diy-...ame-boy-color/
Without this, Star Fox wouldn’t be 3D, Yoshi’s Island wouldn’t be as cute, and there wouldn’t be an always-on processor in your computer with the potential to spy on everything you do.
The Super FX chip, the Capcom-developed Cx4 co-processor, and the Nintendo DSP all lived in a cartridge, but the technology to put a better computer in a cartridge never made it to Nintendo’s handheld devices. Cheap, powerful micro-controllers are everywhere now, and it’s not that hard to make a board with card edge connectors, leading Anders to build a Super FX for the Game Boy Color.
https://hackaday.com/2016/11/09/diy-...ame-boy-color/