[video=youtube;NLEMsw1SjDY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLEMsw1SjDY[/video]
I already knew most of this, but its an interesting watch nonetheless.
It's insane that games came bundled with a processor. Imagine buying Battlefield and included is a more powerful GPU so your console can run it at the full resolution. Were processors so much cheaper back then?
[QUOTE=Robber;51038413]It's insane that games came bundled with a processor. Imagine buying Battlefield and included is a more powerful GPU so your console can run it at the full resolution. Were processors so much cheaper back then?[/QUOTE]Cartridges were pretty darn expensive to manufacture (especially with manufacturer markup - the console creators controlled all cartridge manufacturing and set the prices and minimum orders) and things like additional chips and save game hardware only kicked that price up higher. This is one of the reasons why the Playstation 1 was so popular with developers - PS1 CD-ROMs could be duplicated for much cheaper than cartridges at much lower minimum order quantities, opening the doors to more developers and more niche projects that wouldn't need to sell as much to make their money back.
This is also part of the reason the 32X exists - Sega's answer to the Super FX, the SVP (Sega Virtua Processor), was so ridiculously expensive to produce that it kicked the price of the one game that used it (Virtua Racing) up to a whopping US$100! At that point, it was easier to just turn the chip into a console-level addon.
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