Information AboutNintendo 64 |
The Nintendo 64, commonly called the '''N64''', is '' (which was released earlier in the other markets). The Nintendo 64 cost $199 at launch in the United States. The N64 was first publicly introduced on two days after the event. Official coverage by Nintendo soon followed a few weeks later on the nascent '' Nintendo Power '' website, and then in volume #85 of their print magazine. During the developmental stages the N64 was referred to by its code name, Project Reality. The name Project Reality came from the speculation within Nintendo that this console could produce CGI on par with then-current Supercomputer s. Once unveiled to the public the name changed to Nintendo Ultra 64, referring to its 64-bit processor, and Nintendo dropped "Ultra" from the name on February 1 , 1996, just five months before its Japanese debut due to the word "Ultra" being trademarked by another company. In addition, Nintendo has been said to have received a lot of negative feedback on the original name. INTRODUCTION ]] After first announcing the project, two companies, Rareware (UK) and Midway (USA), created the arcade games '' Killer Instinct '' and '' Cruis'n USA '' which claimed to use the Ultra 64 hardware. In fact, the hardware had nothing to do with what was finally released; the arcade games used Hard Drive s and TMS processors. ''Killer Instinct'' was the most advanced game of its time graphically, featuring pre-rendered movie backgrounds that were streamed off the hard drive and animated as the characters moved horizontally. Nintendo touted many of the system's more unusual features as groundbreaking and innovative, but many of these features had, in fact, been implemented before. The first game console to bill itself as "64-bit" was actually the Atari Jaguar (though the Jaguar had two 32-bit processors, its graphics processor was 64-bit). The Vectrex in fact had introduced analog joysticks, while the first to feature four controller ports was the Bally Astrocade . Regardless, the Nintendo 64 was the first ''popular'' system to have these features. The system was designed by Silicon Graphics Inc., and features their trademark Dithered 32-bit graphics. The early N64 Development System was an SGI Indy equipped with an add-on board that contained a full N64 system. Some of Nintendo's most notable games for the N64 are:
''Super Mario 64'' is still considered to have set the standard for 3D platform games and is considered by many to be one of the greatest games ever published. Apart from Nintendo's own in-house development, Rareware produced a steady stream of titles for the N64. Some of their more popular titles include:
The last Nintendo 64 game to be released in the United States was '' Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 '' on August 20 , 2002 while '' Mario Party 3 '' released on 16 November , 2001 was the last title Europe would see. In G4 's recent 'Top 10 Games Consoles' feature on the show "Filter", the Nintendo 64 was voted number one against other consoles. CARTRIDGES VS. DISCS The Nintendo 64 was the last mainstream home video game console to use ROM Cartridge s to store its games (although the last real cartridge based system to have still continued production was SNK 's Neo Geo MVS hardware until 2003 ). Nintendo's choice had several advantages: # ROM cartridges have very fast load times in comparison to Disc based games. This can be observed from the loading screens that appear in many PlayStation games but are typically non-existent in N64 versions. # ROM cartridges are difficult and expensive to duplicate, thus resisting Piracy (albeit at the expense of lowered Profit Margin for Nintendo). While unauthorized interface devices for the PC were later developed, these devices are rare when compared to a regular CD drive as used on the PlayStation. Also, playable emulation of Nintendo 64 games was not possible until relatively recently, with the advent of more powerful computers. # It is possible to add specialized support chips (such as coprocessors) to ROM cartridges, as was done on some SNES games. # Most cartridges store individual profiles and game progress on the cartridge itself, eliminating the need for separate and expensive Memory Card s. Storing data at first required a cartridge Battery whose energy would diminish over time, though the battery generally lasted for years, and in subsequent games EEPROM s were used instead. While Nintendo chose the cartridge format for the N64, the company originally signed a contract with Sony in 1988 to develop a CD-ROM drive add-on for the SNES. When Hiroshi Yamauchi read the (already signed by Nintendo) original 1988 contract between Sony and Nintendo and learned that it allowed Sony 25% of the profits from the machine, he was furious. He deemed the contract totally unacceptable, and secretly cancelled all plans for a joint Nintendo-Sony SNES CD attachment. Indeed, instead of announcing their partnership, at 9 AM the day of the CES, Nintendo chairman Howard Lincoln stepped onto the stage and revealed that they were now allied with Phillips, and were planning on abandoning all the previous work Nintendo and Sony had accomplished. Lincoln and Minoru Arakawa had (unbeknownst to Sony) flown to Phillips headquarters in Europe and formed an alliance. In addition to the CD-ROM add on, Sony would release a combination Super NES/CD-ROM system in one unit, which would have been called the PlayStation. Initially, Nintendo's abandonment of the joint project caused Sony to consider halting their research, but ultimately the company decided to use what they had developed so far and make it into a complete, stand alone console. This led to Nintendo filing a lawsuit claiming breach of contract and attempted, in U.S. federal court, to obtain an injunction against the release of the PlayStation, on the grounds that Nintendo owned the name. The federal judge presiding over the case denied the injunction. Graphically, benefits of the Nintendo cartridge system were mixed. While N64 games generally had higher Polygon counts, the limited storage size of ROM carts limited the amount of available textures, resulting in games which had a plain and flat-shaded look. Later cartridges such as '' Resident Evil 2 '' featured more ROM space, which demonstrated that N64 was capable of detailed in-game graphics when the media permitted, but this performance came late in the console war and at a high price. At that time, competing systems from '' was released on the Nintendo Gamecube in 2004 . The cost of producing an N64 cartridge was far higher than producing a CD: one gaming magazine at the time cited average costs of twenty-five dollars per cartridge, versus 10 cents per CD. Publishers had to pass these higher expenses to the consumer so N64 games tended to sell for slightly higher prices than PlayStation games did. While most PlayStation games rarely exceeded $50, N64 titles could reach $80. Despite the controversies, the N64 still managed to support many popular games, giving it a long life run. N64 took second place for its generation of consoles while the PlayStation finished first, with 40% and 51% of the market respectively. Much of this success was credited to Nintendo's strong first-party Franchises , such as '' Mario '' and '' Zelda '', which had strong name brand appeal yet appeared exclusively on Nintendo platforms. The N64 also secured its share of the mature audience thanks to '' GoldenEye 007 '', '' Resident Evil 2 '', '' Shadow Man '', '' Doom 64 '' and '' Quake II ''. In 2001, the Nintendo 64 was replaced by the disc-based Nintendo GameCube , although even with this system they refused to use mainstream CD / DVD technology, opting for the DVD-based but incompatible GameCube Optical Disc , which is much smaller than standard-sized CD/ DVD media. The successor to the GameCube, Wii uses "12 cm optical discs" for storage, which are just Encrypted DVDs, thus making it the first Nintendo console to use a standardized storage format. HARDWARE Specifications
Architecture and Development The CPU was primarily used for game logic, such as input management, some audio, and AI, while the RCP did everything else. The RDP component basically just read a FIFO buffer and Rasterized polygons. The RSP was the Transform portion of the RCP, although it was really just a DSP , similar to a MIPS R4000 core, designed to work with 8-bit Integer Vector Operation s. In a typical N64 game the RSP would do Transforms , Lighting , Clipping , Triangle Setup , and some of the audio Decoding . Nintendo 64 was one of the few consoles without a dedicated audio chip so these tasks fell on the RSP and/or CPU. It was relatively common to do audio on the main CPU to increase the graphics performance. Workload on the Nintendo 64 could be arranged almost in any way the programmer saw fit. This created a fascinating system that was quite flexible and moldable to the game's needs, but it also assumed the programmer would be able to properly Profile The Code to optimize usage of each part of the machine. The RSP is completely programmable, through Microcode (µcode). By altering the microcode run on the device it can perform different operations, create new effects, be better tuned for speed or quality, among other possibilities. However, Nintendo was quite unwilling to share the microcode tools with developers until the end of Nintendo 64's lifecycle when they shared this information with a select number of companies. Programming RSP microcode was said to be quite difficult because the Nintendo 64 µcode tools were very basic, with no debugger, and poor documentation. As a result, it was extremely easy to make mistakes that would be very hard to track down; mistakes that could cause seemingly random bugs or glitches. Some developers noted that the default SGI microcode ("Fast3D") was actually quite poorly profiled for use in games (it was too accurate), and performance suffered as a result. Several companies were able to create custom microcode programs that ran their software far better than SGI 's generic software (i.e. Factor 5 , Boss Game Studios , and Rare ). Two of the SGI microcodes
The Nintendo 64 had some glaring weaknesses that were caused by a combination of oversight on the part of the hardware designers, limitations on 3D technology of the time, and manufacturing capabilities. One major flaw was the limited texture Cache of 4KB. This made it extremely difficult to load large Texture s into the rendering engine, especially textures with high Color Depth . This was the primary cause of Nintendo 64's blurry texturing, secondary to the blurring caused by the Trilinear Filtering and limited ROM storage. To make matters worse, because of how the renderer was designed, if Mipmap ping was used the texture cache was effectively halved to 2KB. To put this in perspective, this cache could be quickly filled with even small textures (a 64x64 4-bit/pixel texture is 2KB and a 128x64 4-bit/pixel texture is 4KB). Creative developers towards the end of Nintendo 64's lifetime managed to use tricks such as multi-layered texturing and heavily clamped small texture pieces to simulate larger textures. '' Conker's Bad Fur Day '' is possibly the best example of this ingenuity. There were other challenges for developers to work around. Z-Buffer ing significantly crippled the RDP's fillrate so managing the Z-depth of objects, so things would appear in the right order and not on top of each other, was put on the programmer instead of the hardware to get maximum speed. Most Nintendo 64 games were actually fillrate limited, not geometry limited, which is ironic considering the great concern for Nintendo 64's low ~100,000 polygon per second rating during its time. In fact, '' World Driver Championship '' was one of the most polygon-loaded Nintendo 64 games and frequently would push past Sony PlayStation's typical in-game polygon counts. This game also used custom microcode to improve the RSP's capabilities. The unified memory subsystem of Nintendo 64 was another critical weakness for the machine. The RDRAM used was incredibly high latency memory (640 Ns read) and this mostly cancelled out its high bandwidth advantage. A high latency memory subsystem creates delays in how fast the processors can get the data they need, and how fast they can alter this data. Game developers also said that the Nintendo 64's memory controller setup was fairly poor, and this magnified the situation somewhat. The R4300 CPU was the worst off component because it had to go through the RCP to access main memory, and could not use DMA (the RCP could) to do so, so its RAM access performance was quite poor. There was no memory Prefetch or read under write functionality either. Despite these drawbacks, the Nintendo 64 hardware was architecturally superior to the PlayStation. It was, however, far more difficult to program for and to reach peak performance/quality. One of the best examples of rewritten µcode on Nintendo 64 was with Factor 5's '' Indiana Jones And The Infernal Machine ''. In this game the Factor 5 team decided they wanted the game to run in high resolution mode (640x480) because of how much they liked the crispness it added. The machine was taxed to the limit running at 640x480 though, so they absolutely needed to scrape every last bit of performance they could out of Nintendo 64. Firstly, the Z-buffer could not be used because it alone consumed a huge amount of the console's texture fillrate. To work around the 4KB texture cache the programmers came up with custom Texture Format s and tools to help the artists make the best possible textures. The tool would analyze each texture and try to choose the best texture format to work with the machine and look as good as possible. They took advantage of the cartridge as a texture Streaming source to squeeze as much detail into each environment, and work around RAM limitations. They wrote microcode for Realtime Lighting , because the SGI code was poor for this task, and they wanted to have even more lighting than the PC version had used. Factor 5's microcode allowed almost unlimited realtime lighting, and significantly boosted the polygon count. In the end, the game was more feature-filled than the PC version (quite a feat) and unsurprisingly, was one of the most advanced games for Nintendo 64. Factor 5 also showed ingenuity with their Star Wars games, '''', where their team again used custom microcode. In ''Star Wars: Rogue Squadron'' the team tweaked the microcode for a landscape engine to create the alien worlds. Then for ''Star Wars: Battle for Naboo'' they took what they learned from ''Rogue Squadron'' and pushed the machine even farther to make the game run at 640x480, and implement enhancements for both particles and the landscape engine. ''Battle for Naboo'' enjoyed an impressive draw distance and large amounts of snow and rain even with the high resolution, thanks to their efforts. Accessories
Colored/Special Systems ; Standard: The standard Nintendo 64 comes in a dark grey color, often perceived as "black". Officially, it was known as "Charcoal Grey". ; Jungle Green: This system was the first colored one released, originally available only with the Donkey Kong 64 bundle. ; Funtastic Series: These consoles used brightly-colored translucent plastic that was a popular fad in 1999 (brought on by no small part of Apple's Rev C IMac computers). These colors were marketed as Grape (purple), Ice (blue), Watermelon (pinkish red), Fire (orange), Jungle (green) and Smoke (grey). A limited edition fluorescent Extreme Green was later released. ; Banana: Nintendo released a Nintendo 64 controller for the debut of '' Donkey Kong 64 '' in the United States. The controller was yellow and the end of each grip was painted brown to look like a bunch of bananas. ; Gold: A gold Nintendo 64 controller was packaged along with the '' in Japan. Soon after, bundle packs of the game, controller and gold Nintendo 64 were released for the US and European markets. The first appearance of the gold controllers in the US were in a '' Mario Kart 64 '' contest in ''Nintendo Power'' Magazine . After that, the gold bundle was a Toys "R" Us exclusive in the US and, as such, is considered harder to come by than most of the other Nintendo 64 colors. In Australia, it was promoted by popular Swimmer Michael Klim . ; Pokémon Edition Nintendo 64: With a Pokémon sticker on the left side, sticker of Poliwhirl, Charizard, Meowth, Pikachu, Blastoise and Venusaur (from top to bottom) on the right on top of a blue top, yellow bottom Nintendo 64 ; this console was advertised in Australia for AU$199 which includes the "Pokémon: I Choose You" video. ; Pokémon Pikachu Nintendo 64: With a large yellow Pikachu model on the top of a blue Nintendo 64; this console was set to promote Nintendo 64 Pokémon games such as '' Pokémon Stadium ''. It has a different footprint than the standard Nintendo 64 console, and the expansion port is covered. It also shipped with a unique blue '' Pokémon '' controller. In Japan, a red edition was also released. ; Clear Blue and Red: This was the last version of the Nintendo 64; it was sold with '' Super Mario 64 ''. The Clear Blue was far more popular than the Clear Red; this was because the Clear Red looked too much like pink. {Link without Title} Digital rights management Each Nintendo 64 cartridge contains a so-called Lockout Chip to prevent manufacturers from creating unauthorized copies of the games. Unlike previous versions, the N64 lockout chip contains a seed value which is used to calculate a Checksum of the game's boot code. To discourage playing of copied games by piggybacking a real cartridge, Nintendo produced five different versions of the chip. If the chip did not match the game's boot code, the game would not run. Backup/development units:
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