The NES that never was article

[Tanooki]

Some even pushed it so far they gave you a choice how to suffer from it... slowdown or flicker (Gun-Nac.)

I think it's a fair article, it's not asking too much, just what if there was a hair more RAM in there to allow the small palette the NES had could be totally used and not just a handful of colors. The level of detail that could have happened probably would have pushed for an even prettier next Nintendo/Sega outing after the NES/SMS, but it probably also would have made them realize CD may have been the way to go earlier, or the fact that performance would have to come not so much from more colors but more on screen tricks (scaling, rotation etc) and amount of stuff capable of being done too (sprites.)

[Flake]

The level of detail that could have happened probably would have pushed for an even prettier next Nintendo/Sega outing after the NES/SMS, but it probably also would have made them realize CD may have been the way to go earlier

Now that is an interesting 'what if?'. Imagine a disc based Nintendo console in the mid 90s and how that would have changed things. Of course, the manufacturing cost of disc drive based consoles was insane back then, so who knows?

[Tanooki]

Yeah that kind of what I was going for.

Back then it was more simple in a way to make a much larger jump in quality than today like with PS3 vs PS4. You had the NES to SNES to the N64(PS1 w/CD) and then PS2/GC those were all large jumps within the SD realm.

Had the NES been a little more expensive at launch for a base system and they put the RAM in there necessary to use the full color palette they would have at Sega been forced to do better than what the Genesis could handle because that sucker has a weak color palette on screen that would have not marveled many against the NES had it did that, but the larger amount of moving sprites would have done it as well as that yamaha arcade audio chip. I think we would have seen the 16bit systems launch with the CD being the drive of choice because the costs of chips were just too much to really have good sized storage for better base specs in the hardware to wow people away from a theoretical NES that good looking. I think the generations would have been moved up a 1/2 level or more from where it really did start.

[MrPopo]

Another odd limitation that seems mostly a NES thing is the sprites per line thing. That of course leads to all the flickering if you're playing a horizontally scrolling game if things get busy and I imagine that's why a lot of the non ported shmups seem to be vertical.

The 16 bit consoles also had a sprites per line limit, but they were much higher, so it generally wasn't a problem.