Hi,

I was listening some retro reviews of the Sega 32X, the famous hardware expansion for the Megadrive/Genesis console, even if back then I never had this expansion or the Megadrive/Genesis itself (the Master System was still a common great console) I found impressive the capabilities of this expansion that unfortunately seems wasn't pushed to its limits.
If I'm correct 40 games were only released and many wasn't great but still I am amazed by the fact that this was really an expansion and not a newer console as I was expecting.
If I understood correctly with a video/audio passthrough cable the work done by the Megadrive/Genesis cpu/vdp was added to the video/audio output of the 32X much faster architecture composing a more complex final tv image/sound; different from what I'd expect by a 3dfx Voodoo accelerator card where the card switch beetween its output and the video card one. So basically both console could be programmed (at least both 32X and Megadrive using one only game) to make some video AND sound effects each and finally compose them.
At the end developers could program all these stuff more or less:

Megadrive: Motorola 68000 @ 7.61 MHz + 64 KByte RAM + Z80 @ 4 MHz + VDP (Video Display Processor) + PSG (TI 76489 chip) + eventually Sega SVP cartridge coprocessor running @ 23Mhz
32X: Dual Hitachi SH-2 RISC @ 23 MHz + Motorola 68000 @ 7.61 MHz + 32X VDP (Video Display Processor) + PCM sound
MegaCD: Motorola 68000 @ 12.5MHz + various cache memories + PCM

This was lot of stuff to program! I understand that back in that time with the PSX almost out all this hardware could still not do much and with the Saturn too it seems obvious developers had other projects but still, technically is amazing having so many hardware chips you can use at the same time.
What do you think about it? One thing I found funny is that at the end you'd have three different power supply for a single home console. 😁
Thank