/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10806597
Depending on the system, yes. They essentially connected directly to the memory addresses of the system, if not also had additional connections to what was the equivalent of a system bus. You still have some limitations though. You are limited by how much current the system can supply to the cart, by the system's sound and video output, and how fast it can process that even if you make the cart do all the work, but beyond that if you can fit it on the cart you can do damn near anything.

Their main limits at the time was your options for such small CPUs and their cost as well as the cost of storage and RAM at the time. Nowadays you can easily jam a 1Ghz CPU, 1TB NAND, and a few GB of RAM on an NES cart if you wanted to.

Case in point, >>10806604

I personally never cared for this though. It's literally just jamming an entire significantly more powerful self-contained PC on an NES cart and outputting the resulting audio/video to the NES while taking inputs from it's controller port. At this point why even bother, you aren't using the NES as anything more than a over-glorified and poor quality A/V adapter for the cart itself, you would literally get better video and audio just plugging the cart into your TV directly at that point.

And like >>10806620 mentioned with that much space you can also just put as much sprites as you want on the cart. It's not like the Genesis technically could not do (bad) FMV, just that it would have taken an insane amount of space at the time. There was a SNES game that had short FMVs on the cart. So you don't have to create a super-amazing-optimized 3D engine on the limited hardware just for that effect now when you can just put a giant ROM chip on the cart and pre-render the sprites, provided you can read them into the console fast enough.

Something like the Overdrive2 tech demo, that was some amazing coding, the 3D AFAIK was not just pre-rendered images.