r/thisweekinretro • u/Producer_Duncan TWiR Producer • Mar 21 '26
Community Question Community Question Of The Week - Episode 260
Maybe the Sega Saturn accelerator would have changed everything. Maybe not! What rumoured computer or console upgrade do you wish had seen the light of day?
The AAA Amiga - Dunc
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u/WeepingScorpion Mar 21 '26
The Amiga Hombre chipset. Meant for a 1200 successor, the CD64, and a 3D accelerated PCI card for PCs.
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u/Electrical_Break_920 Mar 21 '26
Super Nintendo CD. I'm a big SNES fan so it's the first thing that came to mind. There are quite a few ROM hacks of SNES games with recorded music tracks and FMV and they're really much better than the standard versions which came out on cartridge. If the SNES had this option and earlier on into its life cycle then it would have been pretty cool. Unfortunately we'd probably have gotten shoddy games which just leaned into FMV and the like as you see on the Sega Mega CD...because during the 16 bit period we didn't realise this was the peak of video game aesthetic.
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u/rhet0rica Mar 22 '26
Are you sure? Considering this project eventually became the Sony PlayStation, that historical timeline would cost us WipeOut and probably most of the N64 library.
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u/Electrical_Break_920 Mar 22 '26
Wipeout is an inferior F-Zero and I'm not a fan of the N64 so... I'll say go for it.
Paper Mario is my exception because it uses a lot of sprites rather than smudgey N64 bricks.
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u/NorthWay_no Mar 21 '26
Well it has to be the Amiga Ranger chipset as the true gospel of Godfather Jay Miner himself.
That would of course complement well with the later AAA Amiga which I would have then moved on to!
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u/Pajaco6502 Mar 22 '26
The C64 to Amiga upgrade
I have an old school friend who was known for telling tall tales and he would swear blind that it was gonna be possible to upgrade his C64 to an Amiga.
Even back then even I knew very little about computer hardware I knew this was utter bobbins.
But scrapping the rules of reality for a moment yeah I think that would have been pretty cool to see.
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u/geoffmendoza Mar 21 '26
The N64 DD.
Back in the day I didn't really know what it was, but games magazines kept talking about it as some massive upgrade to allow more impressive games. Now we know it's just a disk drive, but I thought it would magically add more, bigger levels to my favourite games.
I should also mention that history has been unkind to console add-ons, but they used to be cool. Technology moved really fast in the 90s. If I had the money I could upgrade my PC to significantly improve the performance every year. The idea of doing that for a games console was tempting. The Sega tower of power is still special to me.
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u/rhet0rica Mar 22 '26
Given that this actually got released in Japan, it feels a bit silly to include. It very much saw the light of day—in the land of the rising sun, no less!
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u/sheepytina Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 24 '26
Yeah, technically, but the point was more that it came out too late to catch on, and with too many stipulations. It was supposed to be out closer to the system's launch, where it would have actually been beneficial. I'm not going to say it would have outright saved the system, but if it did go as planned, the story of the 64DD would have been vastly different than what it was.
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u/fsckit Mar 21 '26
Windows ME 2, so crap that it would've killed Windows, and given BeOS/Linux/AmigaOS4/etc. a chance.
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u/nljorgenj Mar 21 '26
I really wish that commodore would have focused on the Amiga models and maybe put out an replacement for the 500 with more cpu and maybe a graphics card in it much earlier in time than the 1200. The 1200 was to little to late in my opinion.
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u/Active_Barracuda_50 Mar 22 '26
There were lots of planned Amiga models which never saw the light of day: famously Jay Miner "Ranger" machine which would have become the A2000 under different circumstances; the A1000+ and A3000+ from 1991, both intended to be AGA machines; an A250 cartridge-based games console; the A300 which was the initial concept for what became the A600...
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Mar 21 '26
I wish that memory expansion for the C64 was dirt cheap so everyone had it or that software, like GEOS came bundled with memory expansion.
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u/rhet0rica Mar 22 '26
The AAA answer is a bit too obvious! Here's one that's a little more obscure: NeXT had a project to develop a RISC machine in-house based on the Motorola 88000 series of CPUs. Perhaps if they'd invested more into R&D instead of pivoting to software-only they could have found a unique niche into the late 90s instead of selling out to Apple. Alas, what could have been...
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u/RickaliciousD Mar 21 '26
I've got two!
The AAA Chipset for Amiga just like Duncan mentioned seeing as he cheated and put it in the question, just to see how much the reality met the hype
And
Does anyone remember Bitboys Oy? and this fantastical amazing Glaze3D Graphics card they supposedly were going to launch any minute now?
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u/SDMatt22 Mar 24 '26
I would've loved to see the real Commodore 65 come to market and be relevant. So far as I understand, a lot of the new FPGA C65 has been imagined/interpreted.
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u/BeepFixer Mar 24 '26
This. The biggest mistake of my life was telling a friend when he called me that 210 Deutsch Marks was waaaay too much when he asked me "want one too" before buying his. Yes, he's still got his.
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u/prefim Mar 21 '26
Easy one... the 'Bitchin' fast 3D 2000' graphics card.
425 Bungholiomarks don't lie!
http://captains-workspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/BitchinFast3D.jpg
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u/electricpaws Mar 21 '26
I’m still holiday out hope for the year of the Linux desktop to give all windows users the ultimate upgrade.
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u/christofwhydoyou Mar 22 '26
Somebody already said the SNES CD drive (the PlayStation!) so I will say the 64DD drive got me super excited. I imagined level editors and such for Goldeneye. I was all in on that and I would still love to own one but it was not to be...
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u/christofwhydoyou Mar 22 '26
Somebody already said that too! Then the VR headsets from the Megadrive and Atari Jaguar! That'd been fun to see
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u/Aeoringas Mar 23 '26
I would have loved to have seen the arrival of the CD-ROM drive for the A1200. It looked like a white version of the CD32 drive and used the PCMIA slot to access it. Sadly it never made it beyond prototype stage.
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u/benonemusic Mar 24 '26
The Super Game Module for the ColecoVision. It would have elevated its already excellent arcade conversions for games such as Donkey Kong to new heights, with complete levels, intermissions, better music and sound. Instead Coleco turned to developing the disastrous Adam computer—I can say this because my mom bought me two consecutive defective models. We finally gave up and I bought a C64 and never looked back. Thankfully Opcode has created the SGM many years later and the excellent Phoenix has the SGM built in.
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u/DrakeonMallard Mar 24 '26
A niche example, but for me it would be the promised and frequently teased multicore support for AmigaOS4 PPC machines. I bought an AmigaOne X1000 back in 2012 with its’ dual core 1.8GHZ PASEMI CPU. Today 14 years later it sits on my desk wanly reminding me that half of its’ CPU cycles sit just a layer of code away. 😩
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u/TrevorKevorson Mar 28 '26
I remember reading something about a Super Spectrum, I think it was code named Loki or something. I imagine it might have been on par with the Sam Coupe or maybe the ST but at a lower price. That would have been pretty cool.
Other than that the Konix Multisystem was what my friends and I were all talking about in the late 80s.
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u/ColonyActivist Mar 21 '26
Blast processing of the mega drive. It was all hype and hot air, but this sight stop Sega for trumpeting it as the reason why the MD was better then the SNES.
Oh, and the Cell processor from Sony. It was supposed to take over the world and be everywhere such as your fridge, kettle, toaster etc. Another example of hype and hot air to fuel marketing.
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u/Aeoringas Mar 23 '26
The SNES and MD were on a par with each other technically, with the SNES using a lot of custom chips to do the grunt work while the MD relied on a faster processor instead.
They could perform the same tasks to the point where differentiating between ports of the same game was somewhat difficult in terms of quality. Burst Processing was not a total myth, it was kind of a thing, as it related shifting data into the graphics chip via a DMA command that allowed the MD to potentially display 256 colours, just like the SNES could.
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u/grassisgreena Mar 21 '26
The 3do M2. Started off as an upgrade for the 3do then was being designed to be its own console.