@lain i’ve written about this before but special chips like this practically killed off those games from being bootlegged at the time - the economics simply didn’t make sense to replicate the chip
hence why the games i played as a kid didn’t exactly conform to “snes classics” lists
> The author of DOOM for SNES, Randy Linden, did not have access to any documentation about the GSU chip or even DOOM source code. He reverse engineered all of it[33]. Randy did a superb job since this is the only console port able to use the PC levels (other consoles had to simplify the geometry).
@lain the article didn’t gloss over the community created MSU-1 however which was a fantastically brilliant special chip that only could have been useful nowadays in an era where memory is cheap and fan composers plenty ^^;
@lain i distinctly remember a sequence in the rising tower in DKC2 where both the music and game sounds overwhelmed the available sound channels, so there’s actual value in it as well more than just lol cd quality audio soundtrack
@cell yeah it's a fun 'chip' (i don't think it was ever made outside of emulators and fpgas), but for me it never really enhanced things much. as you say, it's mostly about CD quality soundtrack, but when I play some old SNES game I never thought "man this would be some much better with an orchestra playing the music".