They were a big step up from the original nintendo cartridges we blew in and wiped with alcohol to keep Tyson winking, but I went the Sega route as Genesis was a better system at the time, but that of course is debatable. Happy people still are interested in the archaic gaming systems.
On the S-RTC, it was used in that specific game to control time ruin events. When you start the game you're asked to input date and time, and from there the game tracks time to enable certain events.
Marketing basically. They wanted the console to look more like video equipment and less like a toy. This concern was because of the video game crash of '83
US market was huge and US subsidiairies could impose their very own vision to HQ. It’s been the case for a lot of vg companies in those days. Check Capcom. Plus everything must look badass in the states, especially as the Genesis (Megadrive) was king back then there and looked way more mature.
Shoving extra chips for bank switching, co processors, and license protection bypasses had been in play since the Atari days (although 2600 had no lock out/cic chips.) NES did though.
My personal favorite was the hack on some NES carts that would use a "stun gun" approach to the 10NES lockout chip for loading unlicensed carts onto the console. They'd literally charge up a capacitor to spike a shock to the chip to "stun" it long enough to boot the rom. Classic stuff.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 36.5 ms ] threadSome discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40111274
I never understood why they were different though.
My personal favorite was the hack on some NES carts that would use a "stun gun" approach to the 10NES lockout chip for loading unlicensed carts onto the console. They'd literally charge up a capacitor to spike a shock to the chip to "stun" it long enough to boot the rom. Classic stuff.