Genesis Virtua Racing Port Almost Cost As Much As The Console Itself, Thanks To The SVP Chip

I can't recall how much it cost in the UK at the time for the game, too much for me is all I can remember!

No wonder it was so expensive. Because, unlike with the SNES where [Edit: I tweaked my wording slightly to avoid the wrath of the nerds] Nintendo very intentionally pre-planned for the specific use of these in-cart coprocessors at the system design stage and enacted their strategy from literally day one (see Pilotwings), Sega absolutely did not. The SVP was a hastily thrown together stop-gap reactionary solution for Genesis, clearly spurred on the by the massive success of Star Fox and the FX chip, and it was very good for precisely one very expensive commercial game at the tail end of the system's life.

I don't know the ins and outs of the tech being used in the Virtua Racing cart, but I feel like Virtua Racing's SVP probably came closer to basically being a separate console just shoved into a cart than any of the SNES' extra chips ever did. But I'm just speculating there based on what I said previously about the way these things were or were not planned and intentionally designed into the hardware strategy from the start. One approach felt very organic and pretty much invisible to the end consumer 99% of the time, and the other not so much.

Wasn't the Virtua Racing cart also quite a bit bigger than a normal Genesis cartridge too, like they literally couldn't fit the final design into a normal cartridge because it simply wasn't ever supposed to be a thing on Genesis in the first place, and it showed.

Meanwhile, there were around 70 basically normal cartridge games on SNES that used extra in-cart coprocessor chips in various ways, and it often resulted in some of the best and/or more technically impressive games on the system: Pilotwings, Super Mario Kart, Super Mario RPG, Doom, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Star Ocean, Kirby Super Star, Kirby's Dream Land 3, Far East of Eden, Dirt Racer, Stunt Race FX, Vortex, Mega Man X2/X3, Star Fox, Yoshi's Island, etc.

i remember reading in game players that the virtua racing cart cast 99 USD and to 8 yr old me it might as well have been a million. they also praised the game itself to the moon.

side note it's hilarious to me that this is tagged "news" 😂

@Ristar24

In the UK this game was £70. It was the most expensive Mega Drive game at that time - Super Street Fighter 2 was quite pricy I remember, due to the memory side of the cartridge.

I recall reading all the magazine promos for this, and repeatedly visiting my local game store to play the pre-release demo they had playing on their stands.

I was lucky enough to get a copy at release from my Mum’s catalogue (Littlewoods, or something like that) only to have the case arrive and not work correctly in my original Mega Drive, the graphics were all corrupted and the car was driving/flying through the sky. Very bizarre.

Regardless of the comparisons with the SNES, this game was a tremendous feat for the Mega Drive at the time. I’d say you had to be there at the time to understand how much of a leap this felt.

@Bod2019 Yup — and while it was an impressive feat, the amount of content you got in the game (one car, three tracks — six if you count Mirror Mode), it's shockingly meagre for that amount of 1994 money.

I believe Super Street Fighter's RRP was £80 — I don't remember seeing it on sale, but I do remember Mean Machines citing the insane price as a negative, especially considering it was an iteration.

I wonder, if it had been released in a format like the Sonic & Knuckles lock-on cart, would we have got ports of Virtua Fighter and Star Wars Arcade? Would Sega have skipped the 32X if they'd had this as a stop-gap?

@Andee

I didn’t mind the content level too much. Given the advancement available.

SSF2 was £59.99. Though my copy I got for £49.99. I still have the sticker on my original copy from release. I’d upload a photo, not sure how on here.

@Bod2019 Ah that's cool (maybe it was the SNES version I was thinking of) — I remember SCE being £65 (but got a fiver off as a promotion in the shop) — but in terms of value for money, I don't think I played another Mega Drive game quite as much as it

@Andee

Agreed, my copy of SSF2 got absolutely hammered. Plenty of spare time in those days 😀

Virtua Racing costs $99 at launch in the US. The average price of Genesis games was $60 at that time. Though it was highly dependent on the cart size and if it had battery backup. For example, Phantasy Star 4 was also $99 at launch.

@RetroGames yeah the cart was much taller than a regular Genesis cart. Though there were many irregular Genesis carts since some publishers manufactured their own carts like EA.

Wrestling with Gaming has a great vid on this: https://youtu.be/x0qe1FNqtCo?si=9K1IFqz2D4Pj-4oq

This game was selling at Software Etc. in the U.S. for $99 on release. I waited a week or so, and the cashier sold it to me for $50 (not sure if that was an error on his end, or if he was pocketing the sale)

Yeah, but it's the best game on the console, and the most impressive racing game of it's generation

I recall reading that the Spanish SEGA office pushed for it to be priced 10000 pesetas (60€ without adjusting inflation) when they were mandated to sell it for 15000 pta (90€). Their argument was that nobody would be able to afford it, and that's very likely!

I remember coming across a video a while back where the creator made a pretty good case that Sega was considering making the SVP a separate lock-on cart. Obviously there has never been a lot of info about it, but I recall there may have been some excerpts that indicated it. If the SVP was going to make games that expensive, it made more sense to have it as a lock-on system so that consumers only needed to buy the SVP once. Of course, that makes it a lot more messy to market the games, much like how people find the PC Engine confusing with the CD systems and system cards. That was Nintendo's advantage, the simplicity, but then their customers were paying a premium on various chip-enhanced games each time they bought one, so there was a downside. It would be interesting to know more about how much the SVP cost versus the SuperFX chip.

Fun fact. The SVP add-on module was cancelled after Sega decided to release the 32X.

@Retrogames: Okay, I've seen your Nintendo fanboy bull for some time now, but this time I'm a bit done. This is simply all not true. The Mega Drive is perfectly designed for expandability in mind. The audio signal even runs through the cart pins so that extra audio channels can be added as do CPU interrupt lines and a DMA set up that makes the SNES cry hot tears of jealousy.

It is NOT a "stop gap" solution, it was the usual SEGA over doing it. The DSP added was very expensive, the SVP is nothing more than a beefy DSP from Samsung that was indeed quite expensive, but could handle way more polygons than a SuperFX chip.

Oh and why no cartridge was adding sound? For most it was "good enough" for the time. Not worth adding extra expensive hardware when the default would do. But why do you think a SVP dsp can add two PWM channels?

Stop claiming things from your obvious Nintendo bias, it's tiresome. Especially to people that know a thing or two about the 68000 and the way the architecture of the Mega drive was setup.

@Damo I remember that according to GamePro, Sega did charge $99 for the game in the USA.

@Dehnus "For most it was "good enough" for the time." is just as much of an opinion. True that it could be the GEMS sound driver as much as the chip itself but it nevertheless gives off rather specific impressions of the console. An average person asked what an average Genesis game sounds like, and that's what they will imagine.
Plus I understand that when the Genesis 2 came out, the variant of the sound chip was different enough that I've heard of some people wanting different consoles just to enjoy music optimized for either the earlier or later model consoles.

@RetroGames Famicom cartridges also had varying sizes, so it wasn't just Sega.
There were also some Super Famicom games which utilitized the Satellaview memory carts so they too had very Super Game Boy-like cartridge shells.

@RetroGames The most bizarre Famicom cartridge I have is a baseball game by Sunsoft that almost looks like an obese Mega Drive cart because it itself had an expansion port, because Sunsoft actually released two update mini-cartridges for it.
Imagine DLC in a physical game from (about) 1990!

I always say we could be living in a completely different timeline if Sega held off on the CD until 94 and threw the SVP in there. Selling the Sega CD as an add on to Genesis owners as well as making a stand along system for new adopters. Skip 32x and Saturn and hit Dreamcast early.

A system like that would have rocked the world in 94 with release lead on PS1 without offending retailers and a far out lead on N64. PS1 from what I remember got off to a slow start (as did Saturn but even slower), but really picked up when cheap disk games became available.

More importantly it would have given Sega a huge jump on PS2 and they wouldn’t be financially stressed before even releasing Dreamcast. A summer 97 release of Dreamcast would have been killer. Hitting PlayStation just as its biggest titles were debuting, and Nintendo would probably be pushed even further back relying solely on its handhelds.

Heck while I am having mad fantasies, I’ll go ahead and say the Dreamcast was made backwards compatible with Sega CD SVP disks, and its controller was a Nomad rather than a VMU controller. You could use the Sega CD style RAM cartridge to back up your Dreamcast saves or play those mini VMU games, or just play your Genesis library.

Okay I admit I have gone too far beyond the boundaries of reality..

@Dehnus Pretty much. Even though SNES debuted a couple years after Genesis, it needed expansion chips to really compete. A stock Genesis can do a lot of things an SNES needed expansion chips for, just by throwing together code to implement the features. There is a StarFox clone someone made I saw years ago here on YouTube and that was a game Nintendo needed one of their later more expensive add on chips to make a reality.
Look at something like Red Zone, there are areas of that game that you could mistake for a PS1 game. Without extra chips Nintendo and third party devs were only putting out NES style games with upgraded graphics or JRPGs that used huge amounts of storage. It makes sense Nintendo did it, they had to.

Sega wasn’t forced into that position, so they only really toyed with the idea. Blundered around not putting their full effort into projects and wasting money. But yeah as seen in all those wastes, Genesis had many ways to expand, the cartridge slot, the side bay/bottom bay, lock on carts, etc.

@Dehnus Why am I even surprised at someone totally missing my point.

If using in-cart coprocessors like on SNES was similarly pre-planned from the start on Genesis too, you would have seen some actual examples of this other than Virtua Racing that came in 1994, literally couldn't even fit into a normal cart, and that cost nearly the same price as buying a new console at the time.

It was a total and utter stopgap reaction to the success of Star Fox and FX chip solution from Sega for the Genesis that came very late in its life in this case.

But, yes, the actual console was designed to be expanded with things like the Sega CD for example (there's where the enhanced audio comes into play), as was the case with most consoles from that time (NES, PC Engine, Genesis, SNES, etc), where they all had dedicated built-in expansion ports and extra circuitry intended for this exact potential for adding new external devices and such.

But that's not what I'm talking about here, and you should know better.

Also, stating some general details and facts ain't "fanboy bull". But it clearly upset you a whole lot. I'm surprised you didn't throw out "Genesis Does" and "Blast Processing" while you were typing that rage post there.

@KingMike That Sunsoft cartridge sounds kinda bonkers. Lol

@Bod2019 Wow, now I know why I never owned it. I did manage to play the game (I think a friend had it), looked great at the time, but I was suprised by the limited amount of tracks. I don't think I'd played the arcade version at that point.

I went on to buy the Saturn port years later, and still play the game now and again on Switch.

I remember being so blown away by this back before I got a PS1

@RetroGames I guess it depends on what you mean by expansion chips. Coprocessors is what SNES was famous for. That is largely due to the fact that the CPU on the SNES is rather slow, so it needed another chip to help with the work of more demanding games. Stock, the SNES was an RPG machine, and the action games that didn't have extra chips on cart were closer to 8 bit style systems like PC Engine.

On the other hand, even though Sega launched its system a couple years prior, it decided to prioritize raw CPU speed, which was good for the system later in its life when SNES was out. It could do the same graphical tricks the SNES needed extra processors for, stock just through programming those features on the basic ROM of a Genesis cart.

Check out Red Zone a basic Genesis cart:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPeI4CcDjt4

There is dude going by Gasega68k who does tech demos of SNES games ported to stock Genesis. Heres Star Fox running at a faster frame rate than the SNES version that had to use an outsourced add on chip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY0N2BVN_X4

Nintendo was the golden child in Japan so Japanese devs put their A teams on it, and gave Sega their lower level programming teams, but even so companies like Konami were able to put out games with the scaling and rotation effects similar to what SNES had to implement by locking the system into a special graphics mode that cut back on what else the system could do at the same time.

Sega could and did make a cartridge with a coprocessor. The cartridge was about the size of an SNES cartridge, but of course Virtua Racing performed 3d much better than Star Fox. They just didn't have the need to do this before as the stock system's processor was capable of matching the performance of what its main competitor was doing with add on chips. Thats why you didn't see games with a coprocessor from them.

Instead they had stuff like the Sonic and Knuckles lock on cartridge with special hardware inside that wasn't about boosting performance but other abilities that made sense. Codemasters released Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament on Genesis with RAM that could save data when the system was turned off, and two extra controller ports.

I think you are not being genuine when you say you are "stating general details and facts". You came in saying Sega Genesis wasn't capable of expansion, knowing full well that the SVP chip exists. Just because it was expensive has nothing to Mega Drive's expansion capabilities. It performed better than what SNES expansion chips did so obviously it was more expensive. SNES also had expensive games, many of which were $60-$100 here in the States. Does that mean SNES couldn't do expansion chips too? In fact most Genesis AAA games here were $50, but many SNES AAA games were $70. The Genesis showed off many ways it could expand, even through the cartridge slot, a coprocessor was just one of those ways. It is factually incorrect to say otherwise, because Virtua Racing is a real object in the real world that factually exists.

@RetroGames
The Genesis was deliberately and obviously designed to be expanded, and through the cartridge port specifically. The TerraOnion can function as a Sega CD, and that's got a BIG 'ol coprocessor in it in the cartridge port. Just because they didn't do it often doesn't mean they couldn't. And actually, in the case of something like the Super FX, when used mostly as a 3D accelerator, the Genesis would actually make better use of it. The Genesis doesn't need to do Chunky->Planar conversion, which is non-trivial, and it has higher bandwidth for moving the drawn graphics to VRAM, so it's very likely it could do higher resolution and/or framerates with the same chip. It's not only designed for expansion, it's pretty good at it! I prefer the SNES to the Genesis, too, but if you're going to call it out on stuff, at least be correct.

Now, that said, that Star Fox demo isn't quite Star Fox. There's no collision detection on the ship (the demo tries to hide it by avoiding anything, including powerups, that might touch the ship), heavily reduced particle effects, reduced game logic, and I'd be surprised if the physics model that the ship uses is as complex as the one in the real deal. Every time you add one of those things, you lose CPU cycles with which to process the 3D, lowering the framerate. Still really impressive, but the chugging when those buildings get dense shows that the Genesis would need help to run it full-bore, too. Even moreso back in the day when people didn't have extra decades of coding knowledge to draw upon and had deadlines to hit, so a little extra brute force to get the game out quicker would outweigh spending ages optimizing.

And nobody's confusing Rendering Ranger R2, Super Turrican 2, F-Zero, Axelay, Contra 3, or Super Aleste for an NES game, @DestructoDisk . You're fanboying just as hard as Retrogames when you say stuff like that. Both machines are capable of great things when handled by developers who know how to push them.

@RetroGames
Just because you don't understand pinouts and architecture, doesn't mean all of us don't. The Mega drive was designed with expandability in mind, it just wasn't that needed for a 'it's good enough' approach. I mean there are so many cases where mega drive games are even better than SNES games (including their "expansion chips").

Just do yourself a favor and look at the cartridge pinout, and actually study it. And you'll learn a lot more. The information is available for free online.

@CocktailCabinet other modern examples are: they can run Doom and Doom 2… on a mega drive by using the controller chips on the Everdrive pro to run it.

And sorry, I just got so tired of his bull after a few articles of: port begging homebrew developers for SNES versions, claiming things and history that simply weren't true and then also getting folks to agree with him.

@Dehnus You have literally zero clue what I understand, as you don't know me--or do you?

Maybe it's time to report you for stalking or something, as you should know nothing about me other than my user name and what I've said in here--none of which have ever remotely stated what I know about the inner workings of any console hardware on a electrical engineering level. If you do know more about me, it suggests you've found that information externally and now might be using it in here in a rather sinister way.

So, what is it, a total random uninformed assumption about what I do and don't know, or is it something else?

There was no pre-planned design strategy with Genesis for specifically using in-cart coprocessors in mind the same way there was with the SNES. The Genesis had the same built-in capability to be expanded with additional external hardware and such like every other console of the time, and any pre-planned expandability was used in exactly the way it was intended with the likes of the Sega CD that even required its own power supply and use of new CD media for its games. And then some other random stuff was kinda just hacked in there eventually out of a bit of desperation too like the 32X and that SVP for Virtua Racing and such.

And the Genesis clearly needed some expansion stuff to successfully compete in the market with its biggest competitor at the time, which Sega certainly wasn't shy about doing and expecting people to build that "Tower of Power" and pay a pretty penny for it. That's how the aging hardware stayed somewhat relevant next to a machine that could display far more and nicer colours, proper multi-coloured transparency effects, more background layers, full-screen full-res 60fps background scaling and rotation, could play Dolby Surround sound, had a standard controller that was far more versatile, and used a bunch of additional in-cart chips to augment and expand its stock capabilities as intentionally designed from the get-go by Nintendo.

Also, using your logic, I guess we can say the SNES was also designed to eventually push fully ray traced graphics, that it was designed to use the Super Everdrive, and was designed with HDMI mods in mind, etc, since all those things have also been achieved via exploiting various hardware and software elements of the console--right. It's amazing to think the SNES Nintendo's engineers consciously planned that use of full ray-tracing into the system from the start, but they just left that built-in expandability feature for someone to exploit down the line. Wow!

The SVP was a reactionary hack job that was a last-minute response to Nintendo's massive success with the SNES' FX chip and the brilliant Star Fox, and we all know it. But at least the single commercial game that used the SVP was pretty good.

@CocktailCabinet Yes, just as the SNES was clearly designed to run fully ray traced graphics from the get-go, since someone has now exploited the hardware to do that too--obviously.

There's a difference between being able to exploit hardware to do new unintended things and what the creators were deliberately designing it for in the planning stages. I'm not saying you can't exploit these systems beyond their intended designs. But everything else you can now exploit the Genesis to do was not because Sega planed for in-cart add-on chips. It was with the likes of the Sega CD in mind--which is not an in-cart chip.

@RetroGames You know what, if you don't understand expandability and how it actually works, then you're lost. It just wasn't necessary for the SEGA games so it never really was used, but a cartridge port is nothing more than an expansion port. Just with a Master System it had less access to memory than NES had. The Mega drive however is a whole different beast.

The 68000 was a far more capable processor than what's in the SNES (basically a 16 bit 6502 with some extra functions). By that I don't mean MIPS I mean capabilities like memory addressing, protected mode, expandability, etc, etc.

I mean, why do you think machines like the Amiga 1000 and 500 used the same CPU? It's in a league of its own for the price it had. For goodness sake man, Intel couldn't catch up until the 80286 and 80386 to have all the same features.

@Dehnus Maybe it's more about certain people not understanding exactly what I'm saying, or certainly not interpreting it properly and/or going off on some side point I'm not even talking about.

If some people think Sega designed and was planning for the use of in-cart add-on chips from day one, go ahead and live that delusion. It didn't and wasn't. It was prepared to add stuff like the Sega CD and had designed the base console with that particular kind of pre-planned hardware expansion in mind, but it was utterly unprepared for what Nintendo did when it was designing the SNES to specifically use in-cart add-on chips to expand its capabilities in an affordable and practical way from day one--and Nintendo executed on that strategy perfectly out the gate.

But, hey, if it makes some people feel better about the Genesis now to believe Sega was on the ball and had some in-cart add-on chip master plan all along--but just forgot to enact it and exploit it until 1994 and in a really clunky and expensive way that they then used for precisely one game and never again--have it it.

I'm sure that's exactly the picture the interview above paints when coming in with such an absolute devout belief already in mind.

@sdelfin "but then their customers were paying a premium on various chip-enhanced games each time they bought one, so there was a downside."

Here's a question: Were games like Pilotwings, Super Mario Kart, Mega Man X2/X3, Ballz 3D, Kirby Super Star, Kirby's Dream land 3, F1 ROC II, PGA Tour 96, Super Mario RPG, Top Gear 3000, etc, all more expensive than other typical SNES games without the add-on chips in the carts?

I know some SNES games were higher priced than normal SNES titles, but I'm not sure if it was attributable to the use of expansion chips every time.

My experience at the time was that most SNES games just cost the price of most SNES games, with a few exceptions in special cases where a game really was pushing the boat out or was a big exclusive and super hyped or was an import title and such. Like Street Fighter II was pretty steep at launch as I recall, but that didn't even use an add-on chip as far as I'm aware. And I'm sure Star Fox was sold at a premium, but there the FX Chip was specifically marketed as some groundbreaking technological achievement that justified such a thing, even going so far as it being prominently displayed on the box.

And, obviously, the single time Sega used an in-cart add-on chip in Virtua Racing, they also made a huge deal out of it and similarly displayed it on the game box too, and that absolutely cost a lot more than a normal Genesis game.

But maybe I'm remembering things wrong there.

@RetroGames SNES games with add-on chips did costs more than the average SNES game. The price of games was highly dependent on how large a game was, if it had battery back up, if it had an add-on chip, if it was a licensed game and if it was published by Nintendo. I remember buying Chrono Trigger for $80 back in 1995. It costs that much because it was a 32MB cart with battery back up.
Nintendo would undercut the prices of their own games compared to 3rd party games because Nintendo wasn't paying any licensing fees to themselves. Nintendo was charging higher fees than Sega and only Nintendo manufacture the carts. SNES games were usually $5 more than Genesis games because of that.
Here is a Toys R Us catalog from 1993 when Mortal Kombat launched. SNES was $70, Genesis was $60.
https://cdn.retrojunk.com/article-images/0zEX3imG6pCJz0q4g5iMG.jpg
https://cdn.retrojunk.com/article-images/Qg5F187TLMw85NibM8JDy.jpg

@sanmansan I was aware SNES games were generally a bit more expensive than Genesis games. What I'm not 100% sure of is how the typical SNES game with an in-cart coprocessor compared price-wise to the typical SNES game without one. That's the part I'm interested in regarding each company's approach there and how effectively each of their strategies were both planned and implemented ultimately. My main assertion being that Nintendo actually planned for the specific use of in-cart coprocessors on SNES from literally day one and Sega simply didn't. And, as perfectly detailed in the article and interview above, it's clear this was the case when reviewing the single time Sega actually did use one: It came at the end of the system's life, it was overpriced, it didn't even fit in a normal cart, and they gave up with such an approach after that solitary example. So, I think Nintendo's very deliberate strategy there was clearly a success, while Sega was patently just fumbling around throwing whatever at the wall to see what would stick by that point--and it showed.

@RetroGames Sega had expandability in its cartridge slot as proven by the 6 J-cart games, Sonic and Knuckles, and Virtua Racing. It wasn’t caught off guard by the SNES’s 2 year later arrival with expandable carts… that was a NES feature going back years.

It comes down to the simple fact that in regards specifically to co-processors, Mega Drive didn’t need them to compete. It could do all the stuff the SNES was doing with their ad-on chips, just on a stock Mega Drive.

It wasn’t until the Super FX chip debuted that Sega felt the need to respond and they did so by responding with a much better polygon experience and just left it at that.

What would be the point in putting co-processors in a cart, that would make the cart more expensive, when they could just sell a regular cartridge cheaper that did the same as the competitor that had to sell a more expensive cart?

The SVP thing just seemed like a way to show off for no reason really, rubbing it in SNES consumer faces that the SNES has a weak cpu. I think it was a mistake. It should have just been an add on. No reason for consumers to pay a hefty fee for special cartridges like SNES customers had to. The Genesis didn’t need co-processors.

@RetroGames What do you think the Genesis sees the Sega CD as? The Sega CD, as far as the Genesis sees it, is functionally a cartridge with an in-cart chip. It interfaces with the machine the same way a cartridge does (looking at a wiring diagram will confirm that most of the expansion port's pins are wired up to the same lines the cartridge connector uses), and there's a pretty zippy 68K in there, as well as additional video hardware. Those are co-processors. There was nothing stopping anyone from putting those things in a cartridge other than the ungodly expense that would incur.
The SVP was - I mean let's face it - kinda dumb, but that doesn't mean every Genesis co-processor would have been had they gone that route. That Shogi game on the SNES that has a full-on ARM CPU is ridiculous, but that doesn't make the Super FX or SA1 bad. Sega just didn't use them much, and that's likely for a variety of reasons.
Cartridge cost would be a big one. While the Genesis was popular in the US and Europe, it fared quite badly in Japan where the decisions were being made. Doing R&D on such a product and producing it costs money, which incurs risk, which you'd be very averse to in SoJ's position. Also, as someone pointed out above, the Genesis competed heavily on price. Making expensive carts on a regular basis could harm that perception of value that they had. Nintendo was a more established brand and could command a premium, so the extra costs of co-processors weren't as big of a deal.
Then there's ease of development. The Genesis has always been much easier to develop for. Why complicate it? The SNES was always difficult to develop for, so sometimes a brute-force co-processor like the SA1 could reduce dev time by making it easier because the code doesn't need to be as tight to be performant.

@RetroGames it was generally $5 to $10 more dependent on cart size. Here is an ad from Electronics Boutique. Both Zelda and Starfox were 8Mb games. Zelda also had a battery back up. Zelda is $50 and Starfox is $60. Even Mario Kart, which had a 4Mb cart but had a DSP expansion chip, costs more than Zelda at $55
https://huguesjohnson.com/scans/EBMay93/EBMay93-VG-06_2400.png

Publishers were very wary of the prices of carts and many games were cut down due to costs, even if it would have performed better. Here is an article about the development of Another World (Out of this World) port of SNES. It could have been 60fps with the Super FX but the publisher didn't want to incur the costs and the dev was forced to use the cheapest cart so the SNES version only ran at 20fps.
https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/

@sanmansan Yeah, SNES' cartridge prices definitely varied just like on Genesis, and sometimes it was due to using SlowROM vs FastROM on SNES specifically, or using a larger ROM size, or having a battery backup for saves, or having a coprocessor, and even sometimes a combination of those.

But, even your previous example shows plenty of games that were more expensive than Zelda that didn't use an in-cart coprocessor:

https://cdn.retrojunk.com/article-images/0zEX3imG6pCJz0q4g5iMG.jpg

So, the pricing in those examples clearly proves that it was not a rule that all games that used in-cart coprocessors were automatically more expensive than other regular games to the end consumers, which goes back to my whole point regarding how well implemented this use of in-cart coprocessors was in general as a very deliberate product strategy on Nintendo's side.

In Nintendo's case it was something implemented from day one and was basically invisible to the end user unless it was literally plastered on the box and the game was noticeably marked up to prove some kind of point about how cutting-edge it was. And in Sega's casse Virtua Racing was the most expensive Genesis game ever made, used a big chunky cartridge because they couldn't fit it into a normal one, came late in the system's life, and the in-cart coprocessor approach never got used again by them because their particular solution here just wasn't viable going forward.

The use of in-cart coprocessors was basically frictionless on SNES and something that was very intentionally designed into the system that was used from the get-go and ended up being extremely successful ultimately vs Sega's messy single-time copycat hack job attempt at a similar approach very late in the Genesis' life. It just is what it is.

@CocktailCabinet See above, as my original point remains the same.

And, hey, if you want to claim the Sega CD is basically an in-cart coprocessor, especially in context of and when considering the content of the article and interview and then my original post and assertion in regards to it, go ahead.

My original assertion in my very first post remains unchanged.

@RetroGames
Look, nobody is saying that the SVP was in any way elegant or well thought-out. The argument you're making, that the Genesis wasn't designed to accept co-processors from the ground up, is provably incorrect. I don't need to pretend that the Sega CD is, from the perspective of the machine, a cart with co-processors. It is exactly that. How Sega decided to package that has nothing to do with what the machine is capable of or designed to do. You're conflating technical implementation with marketing philosophy. Sega's strategy was to sell you the extra chip once as a permanent fixture, Nintendo put the chips in games a la carte and bumped the price up on the carts. Everything you're tripped up on is marketing, not technical capability or design. The capability exists on both machines to expand in either way, and both machines were designed to do so. You can have a regular-sized Genesis cartridge with a co-processors. You can have a massive SNES cartridge that has a Netburst P4 in it that needs a heatsink and its own power cable.

And, assuming you haven't edited it out by now, quit whining about this "Church of Sega" crap. The Genesis and Sega writ large have plenty of mistakes and hardware shortcomings to call out, this just isn't one of them. The Genesis is very expandable, whether it's co-processors or expandable media or modems, and it can all happen on the cartridge bus. They just decided to package their expansions differently.

@CocktailCabinet Nope, the argument I am making and have made since my very first comment here is that Sega did not design the Genesis with the specific use of in-cart coprocessors in mind in the slightest--and you know exactly what I mean here, especially in the context of the article and interview--and it never remotely planned this as a strategy before the system's release either. It used this specific approach for the first and only time with the SVP as a clunky hack job reaction to Nintendo's massive success with Star Fox and the FX chip. And, where Nintendo's very much pre-planned hardware and business strategy in that regard was a huge success from literally day one and indeed throughout the lifespan of the console, Sega's was ultimately a huge flop in that same regard (and not just with the SVP, but even with the likes of the Sega CD and 32X too).

And, guess what, yes, it very much is the church of Sega and Genesis trying to spin any other bullcrap take on it--yeah, I said it.

@RetroGames
Again, because it wasn't pursued does not mean it wasn't designed to be able to do it. You are confusing how the expansions were marketed with technical design and intent. Both machines do the same thing, the companies simply decided to package those expansions differently. They were both designed to be able to expand in these ways, and they were from day one. Sega could have taken Nintendo's per-cart approach, and that would work fine on the Genesis, and Nintendo could have taken Sega's "buy the chips once" approach, and that also would have worked fine on the SNES.
And this isn't someone spinning Sega bias. I will take the SNES over the Genesis every single time, and I won't even need to think about it. This is about you being incorrect and (some, not all) people trying to give you actual information. As I said earlier, there's plenty to call out about the Genesis, this just isn't one of those things.

@CocktailCabinet You can babble on and try to reframe it to fit your nerdgasm narrative all you want. My point is still exactly the same as my very first post: Nintendo did the whole in-cart coprocessor thing perfectly and exactly as planned both in a hardware and strategy sense from day one, and Sega utterly flubbed there precisely because it hadn't intentionally pre-planned for this specific in-cart coprocessor approach at any point from either a hardware or strategy sense. Sorry if that upsets the flock--be you one of them or not.

@RetroGames There's no narrative. There's a bloody technical implementation that is clearly very deliberate. The system wouldn't be wired the way it is if it weren't. It's just that simple, and your original post has tons of factual errors in it.
Oh, your - What is that, third? - edit just came through. Perfectly implemented is a stretch. The Super FX, especially the SFX2, are very much hamstrung by the system's memory bandwidth and overhead caused by the planar graphics format. In fact, if a system were to be designed for expanding video capabilities, you'd probably want to have a packed pixel mode like the Ge- ah, you know what? Never mind. You're totally right, Nintendo didn't do anything short-sighted with regards to expansion at all.

@RetroGames

Like I explained to you earlier. Nintendo overcharged 3rd parties. That's why those 3rd party games were more expensive than Zelda. 1st party games, aka games published by Nintendo, were cheaper than games published by 3rd parties. Remember every 3rd party was charged a $10 licensing fee per cart . That's on top of the additional charge for manufacturing each cart, which had to be bought from Nintendo.
Also, like I explained to you earlier, costs were also dependent on the size. Zelda was 8Mb, which compared to the games on the ad was miniscule. For example Street Fighter 2 Turbo was 20Mb, more than twice the size of Zelda, which is why it was $70.
The enhancement chips greatly added cost to the games, just adding a battery back up would increase the cost by $2.50 per cart for the publisher, they would than up charge more onto consumers because retailers would take a percentage of each sale.
So yes enhancement chips cost more.

It seems you have a weird objective just to prove your point without looking at facts. Look I understand your a Nintendo fanboy and some of the other commentators are obviously Sega fanboys who are also using opinions as facts. But the fact is enhancement chips increase cost.

@CocktailCabinet Those things are utterly irrelevant to the original point I made and continued point I am making about the in-cart coprocessor approach as pre-planned--or not in Sega's case--and enacted by both companies.

But, hey, go off on some more nerdgasm tangents all you want.

And, if you have a problem with someone editing a comment, why not go away for a day and then come back and reply at that time. Stop being so eager to put across your rebuttal to my original point the second after I finish typing initially.

I edit stuff to clean up and refine what I am saying. Deal with it, or cry about it.

@sanmansan That facts seem to support my point that the use of the in-cart coprocessors did not noticeably or negatively affect SNES owners purchasing carts in some overt way every time they went out to buy a game, like games with coprocessors were always more expensive for the end consumer than games without them.

Sometimes using these in-cart coprocessors did have an effect on the price relative to other standard games and sometimes it didn't--for the end consumer. Sometimes games without in-cart coprocessors were actually more expensive than games with them--for the end consumer. So, ultimately, Nintendo's approach of using these in-cart coprocessors was basically frictionless for SNES consumers and gamers when all is said and done. That's my only point in that regard really.

Now, some people are maybe trying to prove otherwise for their own agenda or whatever, but the facts as even provided by your own examples don't support that.

So, basically, on that particular point, Nintendo did gud. I'd like to think you can reasonably agree there--but maybe I am wrong on that one.

@RetroGames
"Because, unlike with the SNES where the hardware was very intentionally designed with these coprocessor expansion chips in the carts in mind from literally day one (see Pilotwings), the Genesis never was."
The capability for in-cart processors existed from day one on the Genesis as well, it just wasn't used very often. The way the system is designed very intentionally allows for this type of expansion. That's what people are trying to tell you and also what you seem to be trying very hard not to acknowledge.
"I don't know the ins and outs of the tech being used in the Virtua Racing cart, but I feel like Virtua Racing's SVP probably came closer to basically being a separate console just shoved into a cart than any of the SNES' extra chips ever did."
The SVP is a very beefy DSP chip with 128kb of RAM. A separate console it ain't. It very much needs the Genesis to tell it what to do and to output its results. A co-processor in the truest sense, and it's in a cartridge! It could do it all along! Almost as if... Someone deliberately designed the machine to be able to be expanded with co-processors via the cartridge slot! Why, that's the very thing we're discussing! How about that?

@CocktailCabinet Here, let's just make it real simple and cut all the complete bullcrap missing the point sidetrack nerdgasm fluff. It's just video games, not life and death, and, as pertaining to the article, the interview, and my core point and hot take on it, Sega dun flubbed on this one and Nintendo didn't. Deal with it. And that's my final word on it.

@RetroGames
Ok. Your hot take is literally wrong, and you seem unable to provide a good counterargument nor are you capable of actually taking any information on board, so I suppose this is a good place as any to leave it. If ignorance is bliss, I truly envy the state of euphoria you must exist in.

@RetroGames But it did affect the consumer. Prices of SNES games on average were more expensive. It's one of the reasons the Genesis was competitive with the SNES even though Nintendo had a 90% monopoly of the video game industry in the United States from 1986 to 1990. NES games were on average $40. Genesis games were $50 and SNES games were $60. That $10 difference was huge in the early 90s, especially since back than parents bought games for their kids.
It's basically why Nintendo lost 3rd party support during the N64 era and was killed by the PS1. N64 games were $70 on average, while PS1 games were $50. Publishers also only had to pay Sony $5 per unit sold, while they had to pay Sega $8 and Nintendo was still charging $10. There were lower manufacturing costs since Sony allowed publishers to print their own discs, while publishers had to go to Nintendo to manufacture carts.
Higher costs always affect consumers. Which is why Nintendo is winning now. They learned that the high price of N64 and going just for graphics isn't worth it. Since the Wii, Nintendo has had the cheapest console.

@sanmansan The price of SNES games was higher than Genesis games in general, but evidently not specifically because of the occasional use of in-cart coprocessors. And it's important not to confuse correlation with causation here, so as not to distort the narrative and facts.

The point being, the specific pre-planned strategy of using in-cart coprocessors in some SNES games was actually a pretty great move on Nintendo's part when all is said and done, because it was financially viable, helped keep the SNES relevant for longer, allowed some pretty advanced titles for the time to come to the system that simply wouldn't have been possible otherwise, and it didn't come at an obvious hassle or downside to the end SNES user.

Now, some people might try to reframe things here and/or go off on nerdgasm tangents for their own reasons, but the truth is the SVP was ultimately a flub for Sega, while Nintendo's strategic use of in-cart coprocessors was a win win situation for both Nintendo and SNES gamers. And that's really all I've said from the start.

@DestructoDisk What Sega needed was a better designed Saturn released 1 year later featuring a single SH chip clocked at around 60mhz with 8kb cache coupled with 2MB SDRAM and a single VDP either using triangles or backward rendered Quads clocked higher than VDP1 in Saturn with around 4 times the fillrate & bandwidth coupled with 1.5MB ram. That would of been very reasonable for a machine designed from the ground up for a 95JAP/96US/EUR release at £/$300. Get rid of a few things to keep the price down like internal save ram, VCD card slot and perhaps the SH1 acting as both the CD-ROM controller and the audio chip but on a 32 bit bus instead of separate 16 bit buses for the SH1 & 68010. As long as its out worldwide by 1996 for 300 it could get good support and more than hold its own against the PS performance wise