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I don't know how common add-ons were in the NES era, but they were very common for the SNES (which was very similar to the NES power wise).

Games stopped embedding hardware when they went to discs. There is no way to put a parallel processor into a DVD.




Well, modern consoles _could_ still be extensible; but their hardware is already so general purpose that there's not much point.

Best you could do w/ current gen technolgy is bundle a dongle w/ the game, where the user plugs in some kind of co-processor through USB.

So far I haven't really seen anything like that -- the only USB dongles I've seen bundled w/ games are for games like RockBand and they're just RF receivers.

Aside from bandwidth concerns, and the poor sales of previous attempts (for e.g the SEGA's whole 32x/CD addon), there's nothing preventing a disc-based from having an external co-processor.




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