Power preservation.
The Bit Wars were an intriguing time in gaming, particularly in the era of one-upmanship between the Super NES and the SEGA Mega Drive / Genesis. While there could be arguments over sound chips, Boost processing etc, we also saw special enhancement chips produced that’d go within the game cartridges to improve performance or make certain new techniques possible. Individual games could be standard bearers with these enhancements, something we don’t see in the modern era.
One example with the SNES was the SA1 chip, which gave boosts in areas like clock speed, faster RAM and more. Perhaps the most famous example of a game using this chip was Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, though the enhancements skipped the PAL territory (Europe / Australia and New Zealand) at the time. Basically, the chip made games run better.
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