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Comment by goosedragons | Hacker News Reader

That's not entirely true. A few DS carts at least had IR receivers (e.g. Pokemon HeartGold). I think Learn with Pokémon: Typing Adventure adds Bluetooth through the card as well. So there was some limited capability to add features, not quite as exciting as extra CPUs but it's not like any GBA did anything super exciting there either.

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> not quite as exciting as extra CPUs

Not that it was an official licensed product, but for what it's worth, there was a DS flashcart that bundled a significantly faster CPU than the DS's own - the SuperCard DSTWO [1]. The extra CPU (Ingenic Jz4740, MIPS) was primarily used for GBA emulation on DS/DSi systems without the need for a GBA slot passthrough flashcart, as was otherwise required - though there was a quite successful homebrew scene around it at the time as well, up to and including stuff like a (proof of concept) port of a PS1 emulator [2].

It was a surprisingly impressive device! The only downsides, as I recall, were the increased battery drain and the fact that the DS Slot-1 bus was only fast enough to allow streaming video output from the cartridge to the system's displays at ~45FPS, irrespective of the rate that the emulator was actually running at internally.

[1] https://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/SuperCard_DSTWO [2] https://gbatemp.net/threads/how-to-play-ps1-games-on-your-ds...

Still have my DSTWO. Heat was an annoying issue too. But for the longest time it was the only way to play SNES/GBA even on the 3DS.

There are some that use the GBA slot for expansion too. The DS browser uses it for a memory expansion, and there's a Guitar Hero game that uses it for some extra buttons. When you boot the console with one inserted in Manual Mode it calls it a "DS Option Pak", and there's a lot more than i thought https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/DS_Option_Pak

If I recall correctly, there was a GBA expansion that measured blood sugar.

It's called the Didget blood glucose monitoring system, and I found it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_DS_accessorie...

It's like the difference between slotting ROM into DDR5 slot[1] vs SATA port. You can still add features by means of fake disk I/O, but that isn't the same as directly interfacing with the CPU bus.

1: perhaps more perfect analogy will be socketing ROM as its own chiplet if that ever made sense

Guitar Hero ("On Tour" ) for the DS added additional controler buttons to allow you to hold it like a guitar Hero guitar and use their buttons in the game. Was a really cool approach.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_Hero:_On_Tour#Gamepla...

Edit: a better picture of it in action, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Guitar-hero-on-tour-ds-...

There was at least one Game Boy cart with fun features: Aprilia had a GBC cart[0] that had an interface cable for diagnostics on one of their scooters:

[0]: https://youtu.be/bknfVpctoSY?si=_neVHq_fkJRfDH5I

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