The typical 90's add-ons are what made the 90's special for me.
While a nuisance to store like the N64 rumble pack, the dreamcast memory card. It felt like upgraded solidity of the device.
While a nuisance to store like the N64 rumble pack, the dreamcast memory card. It felt like upgraded solidity of the device.
Closest thing is that a friend of mine had a NES and a cartridge with 365 games on it (in a menu with snails crawling towards each other), two controllers and the gun.
Then once you accept this, it becomes easier to consider a company buying bandwidth on that satellite for its own purposes.
That this purpose is a modem on a Super Famicom, that receives game data from the broadcast satellite, and that at certain specific moments you can play the game with a voice track being blasted in real time by the broadcast satellite becomes conceivable.
It was purely one-way communication, so payment and access control (if any) was handled locally by the cartridge. As far as I know none of those supported per-game payment, so the payment was included in the purchase/rental price of the cartridge/modem.
Modular stuff is fun, especially if it looks nice on a shelf, but it becomes a nuisance when your shelf runs out of room, or when you upgrade a system and you either have to re-buy some gear or find that's there's no real replacement.
For example, after buying an N64, would you keep your SNES around just for your Super Gameboy?
* The Megadrive plus MegaCD plus 32X, affectionately called "The Tower of Power". I have one and it is quite a hefty beast.
* Sonic & Knuckles with its lock-on technology that allowed plugin Sonic 3 (or Sonic 2) to form the full game.
* Virtua Racing and its SVP chip, Sega's answer to the SuperFX.
* The Saturn and its extension cartridges that provided additional RAM.
* The Dreamcast and its VMU.
Sadly, it wasn't for gaming. It was part of a study into the limitations of how much information humans can absorb at once, with the haptic feedback being tested as yet another input when there was a lot of auditory and visual input. I joked they should just use smell, but I don't think they wanted to subject the undergrad research subjects to weird smells.
The annoying thing, of course, was that you couldn't plug in a rumble pak and a memory card at the same time. There were third-party options available, but third-party memory cards had a bad reputation.
The Dreamcast solved this by having two slots. The VMUs were insanely cool at the time, and honestly still are. Some games used them in cool ways, such as Resident Evil showing your health.