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This strategy was used in most cartridge-based systems that became popular enough to warrant the engineering effort. The original NES had "mappers" which accomp
by seibelj 7y ago
This strategy was used in most cartridge-based systems that became popular enough to warrant the engineering effort. The original NES had "mappers" which accomplished similar feats, mostly expanding ROM / RAM but also interesting actions like triggering interrupts when the PPU (Picture Processing Unit, nowadays called GPU) took certain actions. https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Mapper https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Mapper
All of this was to squeeze more performance and make more advanced games.
- tenebrisalietum 7y agoOne mapper even added audio channels to the NES, but would only work on the Japanese Famicom because the pins passing through the audio weren't present on the American NES. There's also one mapper that I guess may have been recently discovered that had a microcontroller on it that had its own ROM and IIRC was an attempt to copy protect the game. I think you can't quite equate the PPU with GPUs - because the PPU doesn't run instructions or render things to a framebuffer. It's more like just the part of the GPU that takes memory and outputs a display signal - in VGA that's called a RAMDAC, not sure what the digital TMSS/HDMI/LVDS equivalent is.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago> One mapper There were several that added extra audio. My favourite is the VRC7, Konami's mapper used in just one game, Lagrange Point, providing Yamaha OPL FM synthesis.
- gvfff 7y agoThe pins are there actually, just not on the cartridge side. The little expansion slot under the NES has these and other pins. Some of the pins are electrical shorts with pins on the cartridge side. So to play Japanese games with full audio all you’d need is an expansion cartridge selectively shorting the pins on that expansion port.