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Comment by mcphage | Hacker News Reader

> The NES, SNES, N64 and GameCube were part of the "bits race" and kept pushing forward in hardware power.

The NES wasn't—it was an 8-bit machine in a time where 16-bit processors were available. I don't really know if the SNES pushed the envelope at all, but you're right that the N64 did.

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The impressive part of the NES was its picture processing unit, which among other things finally delivered on an arcade-like experience at home and gained mass appeal in the process. For the time it was considered quite an advanced chip in its price range. The other extremely clever thing Nintendo did with the NES was to put the video bus on the cartridge, and this enabled them to expand the console's apparent capabilities by adding new features to game paks. This helped to keep the NES competitive in the market for many years.

> The other extremely clever thing Nintendo did with the NES was to put the video bus on the cartridge, and this enabled them to expand the console's apparent capabilities by adding new features to game paks.

Can you imagine putting the video card in every copy of a game now? What a time that was.

| Can you imagine putting the video card in every copy of a game now?

I remember Star Fox (which included the SuperFX graphics chip on the cartridge) going for $90 on release in 1993.

That's $188.95 in today's dollars.

Well the Famicom came out several years before the NES, so it was a bit more competitive at that time.

No console had a 16-bit processor when the NES was released.

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