Curious, is there a reason to think the 65816 wasn’t just a good CPU? From a supplier Nintendo had a good working relationship with?
I mean, we'll never know for sure, but what was the cpu landscape like? Were the other options clearly better?
I mean, we'll never know for sure, but what was the cpu landscape like? Were the other options clearly better?
Other 16bit consoles used an off-the-shelf 68000, combined with custom support chips. Nintendo made their own custom cpu silicon, an off-the-shelf soft-cpu and custom support logic for bus control and DMAs.
And there simply weren't that many 16bit soft-cpus available for Nintendo to license. You couldn't license the 68000 HDL, nor the 8086 HDL.