Super Nintendo Entertainment System

The development of the Super Famicom was led once again by Masayuki Uemura's R&D2 division at Nintendo. The system used a Ricoh 5A22 CPU based on the WDC 65C816, a 16-bit extension of the 6502 architecture used in the original Famicom. Running at a variable clock speed of 1.79, 2.68, or 3.58 MHz depending on the memory region being accessed, the CPU was notably slower in clock speed than the Genesis's 7.67 MHz Motorola 68000, a disparity that Sega exploited mercilessly in its "Blast Processing" marketing campaigns. However, the SNES compensated with superior graphics and audio subsystems that gave it significant advantages in visual and sonic presentation.

The SNES's graphics hardware, driven by dual PPU (Picture Processing Unit) chips, was substantially more capable than the Genesis's VDP. It could display 256 colors simultaneously from a palette of 32,768, compared to the Genesis's 64 from 512. The system supported up to 128 sprites, eight background layers (though practically limited by VRAM to fewer), hardware transparency effects through color mathematics, and the celebrated Mode 7 rotation and scaling capability. These features gave SNES games a visual richness and complexity that the Genesis could not fully match, particularly in the areas of color depth and special effects.

The audio system was perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the SNES hardware, and its development story is deeply intertwined with the origin of the PlayStation. Sony's Ken Kutaragi, then a relatively junior engineer, designed the SPC700 digital signal processor and the associated S-DSP chip that powered the SNES's audio. This eight-channel ADPCM sound system, with 64KB of dedicated sound RAM and hardware support for ADSR envelope generation, echo, reverb, pitch modulation, and stereo panning, delivered audio quality that was generations ahead of the Genesis's FM synthesis. Composers like Koji Kondo (Super Mario World, A Link to the Past), Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy IV, V, VI), and Yasunori Mitsuda (Chrono Trigger) created soundtracks of extraordinary beauty and sophistication. The collaboration between Kutaragi and Nintendo on the audio hardware led to discussions about a CD-ROM peripheral, which ultimately became the catalyst for the PlayStation after the partnership between the two companies collapsed.

The Sony-Nintendo CD-ROM deal and its spectacular collapse remains one of the most consequential events in gaming history. In 1988, Nintendo approached Sony to develop a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Famicom, with Kutaragi leading Sony's technical development. The agreement gave Sony control over the CD-ROM format and licensing, terms that Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi grew increasingly uncomfortable with as he recognized the strategic implications. In June 1991, at the Consumer Electronics Show, Sony announced the "Play Station," a Super Famicom-compatible device with a CD-ROM drive. The next day, Nintendo announced a competing CD-ROM partnership with Philips, publicly humiliating Sony. This betrayal directly led to the creation of the PlayStation as a standalone console and fundamentally altered the gaming industry's competitive landscape.

The Super FX chip represented a landmark collaboration between Nintendo and British developer Argonaut Games. The chip's development was led by Jez San, Argonaut's founder, and Ben Cheese, who designed the RISC-based co-processor specifically to handle 3D polygon calculations that the SNES's 65C816 CPU could not perform in real time. The original Super FX (MARIO chip) ran at 10.5 MHz and powered Star Fox with flat-shaded polygons at a modest resolution. The improved Super FX 2 (GSU-2) doubled the clock speed to 21 MHz and enabled more complex games like Yoshi's Island, which used the chip not for 3D polygons but for advanced 2D scaling and rotation effects that created the game's distinctive hand-drawn visual style. The Super FX chip's development prefigured the GPU-centric architecture of modern gaming hardware, where dedicated graphics processors handle rendering tasks that general-purpose CPUs cannot efficiently perform.

Enhancement chip technology became a defining characteristic of the SNES platform. Unlike the Genesis, which relied almost entirely on its base hardware throughout its lifespan, the SNES ecosystem embraced cartridge-based hardware expansion as a means of extending the console's capabilities. This approach increased cartridge manufacturing costs but allowed the SNES to deliver experiences that would have been impossible on the base hardware alone, effectively making each enhanced cartridge a minor hardware upgrade for the duration of that game.