| ▲ | Cthulhu_ 6 days ago |
| I never had any of these back then, and I keep wondering what it would have been like to be all-in on these ecosystems. Especially Nintendo; gameboys with link cables, N64s with controller add-ons to insert your GB cartridges into, Super Nintendos with cartridges that add 3D hardware to your system, etc. Closest thing is that a friend of mine had a NES and a cartridge with 365 games on it (in a menu with snails crawling towards each other), two controllers and the gun. |
|
| ▲ | pezezin 5 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Sega was quite crazy too. From the top of my head: * The Megadrive plus MegaCD plus 32X, affectionately called "The Tower of Power". I have one and it is quite a hefty beast. * Sonic & Knuckles with its lock-on technology that allowed plugin Sonic 3 (or Sonic 2) to form the full game. * Virtua Racing and its SVP chip, Sega's answer to the SuperFX. * The Saturn and its extension cartridges that provided additional RAM. * The Dreamcast and its VMU. |
|
| ▲ | dfxm12 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Like op says, fun and a nuisance. :) Modular stuff is fun, especially if it looks nice on a shelf, but it becomes a nuisance when your shelf runs out of room, or when you upgrade a system and you either have to re-buy some gear or find that's there's no real replacement. For example, after buying an N64, would you keep your SNES around just for your Super Gameboy? |
| |
| ▲ | Foobar8568 6 days ago | parent [-] | | I was still playing my NES games when I had my SNES, and I guess I stopped playing once I got the N64, same for the SNES/N64.
Actually I disliked the first gen 3d consoles, the lack of details and colors in textures was a large turn off, I never really understood indianapolis 500 on DOS, couldn't stand superfx games and all these games had such graphics. |
|
|
| ▲ | komali2 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It was even crazier in Japan and to this day I don't quite understand how their 90s- era "videogame sent over television" and "videogame sent over ancient cell network" features and dongles worked. I'm trying to remember the names of these features exactly but can't, I just know that it was like, the NES or SNES you could "download" games onto somehow from a TV signal, and then the GB or perhaps GBA had something similar if you connected your console to your phone. |
| |
| ▲ | philistine 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The first thing to consider is that the island nation of Japan is geographically small. Small enough that a single satellite could serve the whole island with broadcast signal for satellite television. Then once you accept this, it becomes easier to consider a company buying bandwidth on that satellite for its own purposes. That this purpose is a modem on a Super Famicom, that receives game data from the broadcast satellite, and that at certain specific moments you can play the game with a voice track being blasted in real time by the broadcast satellite becomes conceivable. | |
| ▲ | jonhohle 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In the US there was the Sega Channel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel which worked over cable. | | |
| ▲ | MBCook 6 days ago | parent [-] | | I got to play that at my cousins’ house. I was so jealous. |
| |
| ▲ | Nextgrid 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A lot of those early "videogames over broadcast medium" worked by having all the games being broadcasted all the time in a loop and the decoder (typically a fat "cartridge" with a modem embedded) waiting until the chosen game was broadcast and then caching that broadcast into some (battery-backed?) RAM or rewritable ROM. It was purely one-way communication, so payment and access control (if any) was handled locally by the cartridge. As far as I know none of those supported per-game payment, so the payment was included in the purchase/rental price of the cartridge/modem. | |
| ▲ | goosedragons 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Mobile System GB. For both GBC/GBA. Didn't let you download games, but content/features for some games. | |
| ▲ | nemomarx 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Satella view is the keyword I think | | |
|
