Nintendo also tends to be pretty conservative when selecting technology for new products (Gunpei Yokoi's "lateral thinking with withered technology"[1]). It's e

Nintendo also tends to be pretty conservative when selecting technology for new products (Gunpei Yokoi's "lateral thinking with withered technology"[1]). It's entirely possible that the similarities between the NES and SNES are that they wanted to avoid any needless innovation -- keeps costs down, makes sourcing parts easier, you already have a lot of expertise in at least some of the hardware you're using, and your developers don't need to relearn as much. Nintendo stuck with pretty similar PowerPC chips for three generations while Sony went MIPS->PowerPC->x86. And when they finally switched off of PowerPC, they went to ARM, which they'd been using for handheld systems for two decades. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_with_Withered_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_...