Now when it comes to special chips, they have absolutely nothing to do with the base hardware. You can put an 8-core Nehalem-EX inside an SNES cart if you want. You can hook up an MRI machine to it if you wanted.
I've heard this viewpoint espoused before with that FMV-playback thing, and I've also heard that it's really not true. This was mentioned to me by someone who has done actual SNES development back when games were still under active development for it - you certainly may put an 8-core Nehalem-EX inside a SNES cart if you want to, but good luck feeding it data fast enough or getting data off the cart fast enough. There's a pretty low ceiling on exactly how fast the DMA engine can shove data across the bus, and while you can bolt pretty much anything onto an emulated machine, I'll be very interested in seeing the issues that crop up if you ever actually try to implement an accelerator in hardware.
