Basically, the "Game Processor" was some kind of system developed by Nintendo to allow people to develop simple SNES games using a point-and-click interface on specialized hardware, which wrote the games onto SRAM-based cartridges for play on regular SNES/SFC consoles. I'm not aware of the system itself ever appearing "in the wild", but it's described fairly in-depth in this 1994 US patent along with some mockups of the so-called "Mario Factory" game creation software that would run on it, as well as details about the "Game Processor RAM Cassette" cartridges used for storing users' games.
There have been a few of these cartridges popping up on auction sites every once in a while, but without a lot of context behind them. There's at least one (badly corrupted) dump of one of these floating around, but given that mine was manufactured all the way out in 1999 and the battery was completely dead by the time I got it, it's probably safe to assume (sadly) that these are basically all toast by now.
An old dump of a RAM cartridge by d4s circa 2008: https://project.satellaview.org/snes/gpc4m.zip (note: it's basically unplayable due to bit rot)
Some images of the game contained on it: https://twitter.com/LuigiBlood/status/1 ... 0699585536
Interestingly, kukun kun's recent treasure trove of Satellaview broadcast videos have included footage of an event in 1995 where some of these games were made available as downloads via Satellaview, with the presenters mentioning the system by name at least a couple of times over the course of the broadcast. I'm not sure how much they actually talk about the specifics of it, though, or what the actual circumstances of this event were (if anyone could pick out some choice info to translate from these videos that would be awesome!)
Video 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez79CMBcFe8 (featuring "Easy Racer" and "Sweet Honey Action")
Video 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fokITLC8F8 (featuring "Puzzle & Bread" and "Flower")
Video 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJStIhjTgRA (featuring "ラジパズ" ("Radio Puzzle" or something) and "Wonderful My Race")
I've also seen speculation in the past that this system was used at Digipen at some point, which might explain why Nintendo filed patents for it in both the US and Japan (for contrast, the Satellaview only has a Japanese patent).
Hardware-wise, the cart contains 4Mbit of battery-backed SRAM (in place of ROM) and some additional ICs for memory mapping and write protection. The RAM itself is mapped like a normal HiROM/mode 21 cart would be. The SRAM is normally write-protected; this is controlled by a 4-bit counter mapped to $6000-7FFF and $E000-FFFF in banks $20-3F (that is, any address with A23=0, A22=0, A21=1, A14=1, A13=1). Maxing out the counter by writing any value to these addresses 15 times will make the RAM writeable; writing to the counter again will overflow it and re-enable write protection. There's also a jumper (CL5) to keep the SRAM permanently writeable, and unused footprints for a write-enable indicator LED near the battery.
Programming the cartridge, in short:
- Write any value to $206000 fifteen times (timing doesn't matter)
- Write your program to $C00000-C7FFFF
- Write to $206000 again to re-enable write protection
Cart/board photos: https://imgur.com/a/hvK1ohX
Partial chip pinouts: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing