| lilbroex said: False. Most consoles have been maxed out. FF3 maxed out the NES. Star Ocean and Tengai Makyo(Far East of Eden) maxed out the SNES. Alien Soldier and Ristar maxed out the Sega Genesis. Pefrect Dark, DK64 and Rogue Squadron maxed out the N64. Tekken 3 and Driver 2 maxed out the PSX. Panzer Dragoon Orta, Guardian Heroes and Duke Nukem 3D pushed the Saturn. Shenmue pushed the Dreamcast to the fullest. Gran Turismo 4, God of War 2 and FFXII pushed the PS2 to the max. Killzone/Uncharted 3 and Heavy Rain pushed PS3 to the max. Skyrim and Gears of War 2 pushed the 360 to the max. |
Cartridge based consoles could not be maxed out. Why? Because they'd always be able to keep adding additional electronics to a cartridge to make the system perform better than it was benchmarked to.
The NES was only capable of addressing 32KB of ROM, but the use of Memory mapper chips broke that limitation. There was also functionality to override the PPU and pAPU with even more powerful variations on the cartridge. Also, check out the many co-processors available for the SNES (SuperFX, SA-1, etc).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_SA-1#SA-1
Of course, the later consoles are too saturated in clock cycles to fully utilise. Of course, no company WOULD fully 100% utilise a console. The code would be non-modular and unable to be re-used in other games (woud be too specific) as well as take too much time to go through with a fine-toothed comb. They'd never get their money back, no matter how well it sold.
