RCBH928 wrote:Speaking of composite being the cheap alternative, its cheap but there are some head scratchers. If they wanted to make things as cheap as possible why would they even put any ports that hardly any one would ever use like Dreamcast serial pot, N64 expansion port, PSX parallel I/O port. Most people would have benefited from an RBG out cable.
Because you cannot always accurately predict the future, it's best to leave yourself options. For computer hardware, those options are expansion ports. While some expansion ports have seen limited or no use, other have proved popular. The N64 expansion port was used for the 64DD, a Japan only disk drive add on for the N64 that Nintendo decided to not support. The Genesis / Mega Drive's expansion port was very well used for the Sega CD add on, as was the PC Engine for its CD add on. Sony actually removed the PS1's parallel support because they didn't use it officially for anything, but yet unofficial devices used it for cheating and region bypassing. The PS1 serial port could be used to link two consoles together, for multiplayer using two consoles and two TVs. A handful of games supported the link cable.