That's a pretty big difference from the Famicom, which was busting out of its own limitations only a couple years after release. It had plenty of games with extra hardware on the boards ranging all the way from the UNROM logic chip, which allowed games to switch larger amounts of code in and out of memory, to Konami's VRC6 chip, which added two entirely new sound channels and a variety of graphical enhancements (most famously used in the Japanese version of Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, making it occasionally superior to its western release). It also even featured Sunsoft's special SUNSOFT-5B chip, which contained special bankswitchers, hardware enabling low-processor cost scrolling effects, and an entire version of the Yamaha YM2149 sound chip, providing the Famicom with Gimmick!, one of the best-sounding games released for the hardware.
The Super Famicom was no slouch in the on-cart enhancement area, and in a much more public way. Perhaps most famous was the Super FX chip (and later the Super FX 2), which was an extra processor that enabled polygonal rendering for Star Fox and the beautiful scrolling and scaling graphics in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. But there was also stuff like Capcom's Cx4 chip, which performed Fucking Trigonometry for the wireframe effects on the Mega Man X games, and the S-DD1, which was a decompressor chip that allowed games with huge amounts of sprite data like the original Star Ocean to hold the graphics in a compressed state and then unpack them on the fly.
And yet, despite the precedent, Mega Drive games essentially only rose above their own seeming technological limitations through the use of clever software tricks as opposed to extra hardware. Some of the most famously technologically-advanced games on the system were only offered the benefit of having some very competent programmers. These include titles like Treasure's Gunstar Heroes, which animated tons of individual sprites, the Vectorman games, which used a trick in the background scrolling to offset individual lines instead of sections, allowing some extremely detailed and smooth parallax motion, and a variety of Konami games like Contra: Hard Corps and Castlevania Bloodlines which demonstrated the company's incredible technical skill in the early 90s.
But there is one. One! A single Mega Drive game that uses a special enhancement chip. The chip is kind of notorious in Sega circles, as it turns out, since its release marks the beginning of the turbulent end-of-life period for the Mega Drive hardware, ignites the 32X debacle, and paves the way for the Saturn's early release and the shedding of most of the success of the Genesis years in America. The chip is called the Sega Virtua Processor, and it was used only in Virtua Racing.
The chip itself was somewhat similar to the Super FX chip in that it worked as a processor to render 3D polygons and then output them as single, small sprites for the Mega Drive to display. It could show up to fifteen frames a second, which is enough to make it pretty fast, and just few enough to make you think you are gonna puke while you are playing Virtua Racing. Maybe most notoriously, the extra cost of the chip prevented Sega from selling the cart at the normal price at the time, and Virtua Racing was price at an ass-busting $99.99 in the U.S., basically double the cost of a normal game.
They never used it again, mostly because of the 32X add-on, though I have heard that a version of Virtua Fighter was in the works before it got canned. It's kind of fun to speculate how much longer the Genesis would have kept on kicking in America if it weren't for Sega's continual marketing failures of the time. Would a continued implementation of the SVP have been enough to let them continue to gobble up 16-bit market share as Nintendo roamed free over that lucrative market during the system's end-of-life era? It's interesting to think about, at any rate.
I got my Japanese Virtua Racing cartridge today at one of my local used game stores. Considering its original price, I think I got a pretty good deal at about sixty-five cents.
