Nintendo was obviously thinking ahead when they designed the Super NES console. Instead of having to add expensive hardware to the console in order to upgrade its capabilities, they developed a CPU that would allow the use of add-on enhancement chips that could be placed inside the cartridge boards themselves. While this would increase the price of the cartridges that sported these special chips, it still saved the consumer from having to buy costly hardware upgrades like the 32X upgrade Sega sold for their Genesis system.

Easily the most popular enhancement chip for the Super NES had to be the Super FX chip. This graphics accelerator chip was created by software developer Argonaut and would allow the Super Nintendo system to draw and manipulate polygon graphics, as seen in the game Star Fox. The first version of this chip were glob tops on the actual cartridge board called Mario 1 Chips, but the later releases of Star Fox featured the actual one-peice Super FX chip.

An upgraded version of the Super FX chip called the Super FX2 was used in the Yoshi's Isand game. This chip ran twice as fast as the original Super FX chip and allowed the complex sprite scaling and rotation that was used in the game's impressive visuals.

The S-DD1 chip was basically a special graphics chip that was used to decompress massive amounts of sprite data that was compressed in order to fit on a 32 or 48 megabit cartridge. Star Ocean is one of the more infamous games to use this chip, and even using this chip, it was still a tight fit on a 48 megabit cartridge. This chip was also the reason it took so long to accurately emulate Star Ocean since special graphics packs had to be used until this chip was properly emulated.

The Super Accelerator 1, or SA1 chip, was the chip made famous for its use in Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. This chip contains its own 65c816 processor that runs at 10MHz. This chip also has a memory mapper, decompression circuitry, and DMA, all of which made the beautifully rendered visuals found in Super Mario RPG possible on the Super Nintendo console.

The SGB2-CPU chip is basically the processor used in the Game Boy system put into a cartridge casing for use on the Super NES system. Instead of emulating the Game Boy system, this allows Game Boy titles to be played spot-on accurately on the Super NES console without the need for any type of emulation. The SGB1 was used in the original Super Game Boy cartridge and the SGB2 was used in the Super Game Boy 2 cartridge. Both basically perform indentically.

The DSP1 chip is a digital signal processor chip that allows for fast vector-based calculations and bitmap conversions. There were 4 revisions of the chip which were numbered 1-4, with the DSP1 chip being the first version and the one used in such Super NES hits as Pilotwings and Super Mario Kart. A later revision of this first chip, called the DSP-1B, was later released to fix a minor bug.

Seta created several different enhancement chips, including the ST010 chip for their various game titles, each one with different types of functionality. These chips normally did little more than help out with AI or clock functions in a few select Seta releases.

Capcom's CX4 chip is well-known as being the fancy graphics chip used in their Mega Man X2 and Mega Man X3 games. This chip was used specifically to handle wireframe effects and aide with sprite positioning and rotation. Although this chip is quite powerful, it's actually used very sparingly in both Mega Man X2 and X3 games.

The SPC7110 chip, developed by Epson, was used in a handful of Hudson titles as a graphics decompression chip similar to the S-DD1. This chip also included a real-time clock function as well.