The Famicom had a modem with online shopping and horse race gambling. It also had a floppy disk module with a ram adapter that also added an extra audio channel. Zelda 1 and 2 debuted on this. It also had 3D goggles, the predecessor to the Virtual Boy. It also had an entire keyboard that plugged in, and a cartridge packed with sprites, tiles, sound effects, and example code you could hack up and save to another add-on: a cassette tape recorder that saved your game projects encoded in audio.
The Super Famicom had a radio receiver that clicked onto the bottom that downloaded new games from space.
The Game Boy had an entire cartridge pin for audio passthrough so future tech built into cartridges could preprocess sound and send it straight to output.
The N64 also had a floppy-disk loading module.
The GameCube had a module that plays DMG, GBC, and GBA games (but more importantly turns the GameCube into an actual cube).
Every time Nintendo adds a weird gimmick to a new system, I say, “no one will use that,” and every time, I am wrong.
The NES had an expansion port on the bottom.
The SNES also had an expansion port.
The virtual boy…existed.
The N64 had an expansion port, a ram upgrade, and a controller memory pack.
The gamecube had an expansion port, and a handle.
The Wiimote has a speaker inside, that only 1 game ever used (that I played).
The WiiU had the WiiU gamepad.
The Switch had the IR sensor, and HD rumble.
Don’t forget the rumble packs. N64 had one, not sure if there were others.
Logitech had a rumble mouse. The only game I know used it was black & white
I loved Black & White! Always tried to play benevolently, but with enough frustration I ended up razing everything
At least half of those were definitely used.
The Famicom had a modem with online shopping and horse race gambling. It also had a floppy disk module with a ram adapter that also added an extra audio channel. Zelda 1 and 2 debuted on this. It also had 3D goggles, the predecessor to the Virtual Boy. It also had an entire keyboard that plugged in, and a cartridge packed with sprites, tiles, sound effects, and example code you could hack up and save to another add-on: a cassette tape recorder that saved your game projects encoded in audio.
The Super Famicom had a radio receiver that clicked onto the bottom that downloaded new games from space.
The Game Boy had an entire cartridge pin for audio passthrough so future tech built into cartridges could preprocess sound and send it straight to output.
The N64 also had a floppy-disk loading module.
The GameCube had a module that plays DMG, GBC, and GBA games (but more importantly turns the GameCube into an actual cube).
You must’ve only played 1 wii game because pretty much every game used that speaker
Three ports, actually. One for network, one for the GBA player, and one that wasn’t used as far as I can recall.
Not totally useless!
Crusty wiimote sounds are a staple
RTS or any predominantly mouse driven game on the switch would be interesting.
Trying to play those sorts of games even on the steam deck is a bit of a penance.