Lock 'n roll: a tale of three cartridges

Game cartridges are pretty cool. Unlike a modern game download, the cartridges could extend the functionality of the base system, allowing console manufacturers to extend the life of their consoles.<p>My favorite example is Star Fox for Super Nintendo, a cartridge that came with a GPU, allowing 3D graphics. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Super_FX" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Super_FX</a> This was in 1993, five years before GPUs became mainstream on PCs.

I remember having another type of cartridge - one that let you plug a UK and a US “shape” cart into so you could play the US cart on your UK machine. Like the “Noah’s Ark” cart it’d use the region code from the UK cart to boot up the US cart on your UK (PAL) machine. IIRC the UK cart had to be the SuperFX type for some reason<p>I used one to play SFII: Turbo months before it came out over here. Unfortunately it wasn’t very well made and knocking the machine while in use would cause the game to cut out &amp; restart, which happened quite a lot during intensive 2p matches!

The MSX computers regularly had two cartridge ports. Some cartridge games by Konami had extra features and cheats that could be triggered by inserting certain other cartridges to the secondary port.<p>Here is a list of them: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.msxblue.com&#x2F;manual&#x2F;romcombis_c.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.msxblue.com&#x2F;manual&#x2F;romcombis_c.htm</a>

I don&#x27;t remember which one I used. As a kid I had one for the gameboy and you could use it to cheat on the old pokemon games.<p>It was fun to play around with but winning the game by cheating never entertained me that long :p

I had that Sonic &amp; Knuckles cartridge as a child.<p>Sadly I never had Sonic 3 so I never experienced the &quot;Real&quot; game, but it was fun plugging in Sonic 2 and other games.

I didn&#x27;t experience the first two, but I remember being amazed by Sonic &amp; Knuckles. I can&#x27;t imagine the technical wizardry that went into these devices given the constraints at the time.

I blame the game genie for killing my nes. I never started getting the flashing grey death screen until I got one.<p>Then again...it could have been because I was a careless child.