White Pointer Gaming is the Youtube channel that examines games and figures out how they pull off the graphical tricks they do, and we’ve linked them to those several times before because they almost always find some interesting tricks to explain, like when the Genesis/Mega Drive pulls off something which looks like scaling, which happens more often than you’d think.
This video is a bit more general than that, describing the various kinds of extra chips included in SNES carts. (11 minutes)
It didn’t have as many different kinds of mappers as the NES did, since its processor had a much larger address space, but it still had a few helper chips included in cartridges through the system’s life. Most of these were essentially co-processors. The most famous one was, of course, the Super FX, which supplemented the unit’s relatively pokey 5A22, providing it enough extra muscle to rapidly draw polygons. But there were other chips, like the DSP line, and the SA-1, which was essentially another processor of the same kind as in the SNES, with its own memory and clocked at a much higher speed, and additional aids.
The use of these chips allowed the SNES to perform feats it was incapable of out of the box. Unlike the NES, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t intended to be used with mapper chips in its initial design, at least one SNES launch title, Pilotwings, used a DSP-1 chip. I have to wonder if Nintendo’s affection for including extra hardware in cartridges played a role in their ill-fated decision to go with cartridge media for the N64?
