Today, let's take a nostalgic trip down memory lane with a little "What if...?" scenario. Remember the Sega 32X? It was this ambitious add-on for the Sega Genesis that aimed to catapult the beloved console into next-gen territory. While it didn't quite hit its mark, it left us wondering: what other classic consoles could have benefited from a similar leap forward?
Let's imagine—what if the N64 had gotten an "N128" upgrade? Could it have kept up with the PS1 and Saturn in that fierce console war era? Or maybe there’s another platform itching for a second wind, like the SNES or even the beloved Game Boy!
What other consoles do you think should've received their own "next-gen" add-ons?
The closest we got were all the hardware revisions for the pcengine and sg 1000. The newer versions of all of those flopped. Like someone said it ends up splitting the player base. It really only works when you kill off the old console so players are forced to move up. See the GameCube -> Wii -> Wii U (which failed mostly because people thought it was an addon like the 32x.)
That said the n64 was the most powerful console of that generation. It was developed for Nintendo by sgi, who did a lot of work on early computer graphics for movies. A 32x equivalent could have pushed it to Dreamcast territory.