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One thing that’s interesting is that is also how the SuperFX chip for the SNES worked, IIRC. It basically was it’s own processor and rendering loop. The SNES’s onboard CPU was provided only a basic program to interface with the frame buffer, sound, and input.

The major difference is that in addition to the actual rendering CPU, it also had hardware that specifically converted the frame buffer into the SNES tile format to easily dump without issues.

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Most Super FX games actually just used the Super FX as a specialized graphics processor and put all the game logic, as well as a lot of the graphics, on the stock SNES hardware. The Super FX was designed to generate sprite data on the fly for the SNES GPU ("PPU") to composite into the scene.

So it was like a primitive graphics card?

Kind of? SuperFX was essentially a second CPU paired with RAM that served as a framebuffer. You would set a pointer that contained code in its ISA format and it would asynchronously calculate graphics (almost like a second thread) and dump it into the RAM, which the SNES would then DMA right into its tile-based VRAM.

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