Information AboutNintendo 64 |
The , often abbreviated as N64, was Nintendo 's third home Video Game Console for the international market. Named for its 64-bit Processor , it was released on June 23 , 1996 in Japan , September 29 , 1996 in North America , March 1 , 1997 in Europe and Australia , and September 1 , 1997 in France (the system also saw a release in South America , albeit an unofficial one). It was released with two Launch Games ('' Super Mario 64 '' and '' Pilotwings 64 '') plus one in Japan ('' Saikyō Habu Shōgi ''). The N64's Suggested Retail Price was US$ 199 at its launch and it was marketed with the Slogan : "Get N, or get Out!" DEVELOPMENT AND INTRODUCTION Nintendo 64 was the culmination of work by Nintendo, Silicon Graphics , and MIPS Technologies . The SGI -based system design that ended up in the Nintendo 64 was originally offered to Tom Kalinske , then CEO of Sega of America by James H. Clark , founder of Silicon Graphics . SGI had recently bought out MIPS Technologies and the two companies had worked together to create a low-cost CPU/3D GPU combo that they thought would be ideal for the console market. A hardware team from Sega of Japan was sent to evaluate the chip's capabilities and they found some faults which MIPS subsequently solved. However, Sega of Japan ultimately decided against SGI's design, apparently in part due to internal problems between Sega of Japan and Sega of America. '']] In the early stages of development the Nintendo 64 was referred to by the code name "Project Reality".Preview pictures from the Nintendo "Project Reality" console had been published in American magazines as early as June , 2006 . Official coverage by Nintendo followed a few weeks later via the '' Nintendo Power '' website and print magazine. In February 1995 Nintendo of America announced a delay of Nintendo Ultra 64 until September 1996 in North America. Simultaneously it announced that Nintendo had adopted a new global branding strategy, calling the console everywhere Nintendo 64. Subsequently the PAL introduction was further delayed, finally being released in Europe on March 1 , 1997 . During this stage of development 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 very little in common with what was finally released; the arcade games used Hard Drive s and TMS processors, although they were based on the MIPS R4600 CPU. ''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 dropped "Ultra" from the name on May 1 , 1996 , just months before its Japanese debut, because the word "Ultra" was trademarked by another company, Konami , for its Ultra Games division. The console was finally released on June 23 , 1996 . HARDWARE The CPU powering Nintendo 64 is a MIPS R4300i-based NEC VR4300. The CPU is clocked at 93.75 MHz and connects to the rest of the system through a 32-bit Data Bus . VR43045 is a RISC 5-stage Scalar In-order Execution processor with an integrated Floating Point Unit . It is a 64-bit processor, in that it has 64-bit Registers , a 64-bit Instruction Set , and 64-bit internal data paths. However, the cost-reduced NEC VR4300 CPU utilized in the console only has 32-bit buses whereas more powerful MIPS CPUs are equipped with 64-bit buses. Many games took advantage of the chip's 32-bit processing mode as the greater Data Precision available with 64-bit data types is not typically required by 3D games. Also 64-bit data uses twice as much RAM, cache, and bandwidth thereby reducing the overall system performance. This was later taken advantage of by emulators such as the UltraHLE and Project64 that had to run on 32-bit Intel systems. These emulators performed most calculations at 32-bit precision, and trapped the few OS subroutines that actually made use of 64-bit instructions. The CPU has an internal 32 KiB L1 Cache but no L2 Cache . It was built by NEC on a 0.35 µm Process and consisted of 4.6 million Transistor s. The CPU is cooled passively by an Aluminum heatspreader that makes contact with a Steel Heat Sink above. Nintendo 64's graphics and audio duties are performed by the 64-bit SGI Co-processor , named the " Reality Co-Processor ". The RCP is a 62.5 MHz chip split internally into two major components, the " Reality Drawing Processor " (RDP) and the " Reality Signal Processor " (RSP). Each area communicates with the other by way of a 128-bit internal data bus that provides 1.0 GB/s bandwidth. The RSP is a MIPS R4000-based 8-bit Integer Vector Processor . It is programmable through Microcode , allowing the chip's functions to be significantly altered if necessary, to allow for different types of work, precision, and workloads. The RSP performs transform, clipping and lighting calculations, triangle setup. The RSP, as said, also frequently performs audio functions (although the CPU can be tasked with this as well). It can playback virtually any type of audio (dependent on software Codec s) including uncompressed PCM , MP3 , MIDI , and Tracker music. The RSP is capable of a maximum of 100 channels of PCM at a time, but this is with 100% system utilization for audio. It has a maximum Sampling Rate of 48 kHz with 16-bit audio. However, storage limitations caused by the Cartridge format limited audio size (and thus quality). The RDP is the machine's rasterizer and performs the bulk of actual image creation before output to the display. Nintendo 64 has a maximum Color Depth of 16.8 Million Colors ( 32,768 On-screen ) and can display a resolution range of 256 × 224 to 640 × 480 pixels. RCP 3D features:
The RCP also provides the CPU's access to main system memory via a 250 MB/s bus. Unfortunately, this link does not allow Direct Memory Access for the CPU. The RCP is cooled passively by an aluminum heatspreader that makes contact with a steel heat sink above. The final major component in the system is the RAM . Nintendo 64 was the first console to implement a unified memory subsystem, instead of having separate banks of memory for CPU, audio, and video, for example. The memory itself consists of 4 MiB of RAMBUS RDRAM (expandable to 8 MiB) with a 9-bit data bus at 500 MHz providing the system with 562.5 MB/s peak bandwidth. RAMBUS was quite new at the time and offered Nintendo a way to provide a large amount of bandwidth for a relatively low cost. The narrow bus makes board design easier and cheaper than the higher width data buses required for high bandwidth out of slower-clocked RAM types (such as VRAM or EDO DRAM ). However RDRAM, at the time, came with a very high access latency, and this did cause some grief for the game developers and limited hardware performance. Nintendo 64 games were cartridge-based. Cartridge size varied from a tiny 4 MiB (32 Mbit ) (i.e., '' Automobili Lamborghini '') to 64 MiB (512 Mbit) for '' Resident Evil 2 ''. The cartridge dimensions were 10.23 × 7.48 × 2.87 Inch es (260 × 190 × 73 Mm ) W×D×H. Some of the cartridges included internal EEPROM or battery-backed-up RAM for saved game storage. Otherwise game saves were put onto separate memory cards. The new controller included with Nintendo 64 consisted of 1 Analog Stick , 2 shoulder buttons, 1 Digital Cross Pad , 6 face buttons, a 'start' button, and one digital trigger (Z). It beat the Sega Saturn's analog controller to market by approximately one month. Architecture and software development The Central Processing Unit (CPU) was primarily used for game logic, such as input management, some audio, and AI, while the "reality co-processor" (RCP) did everything else. The RCP was a customized processor that performed the majority of audio and visual tasks within the Nintendo 64. The chip is split into two main units, the "reality drawing processor" (RDP) and the "reality signal processor" (RSP). It also provides the system's interface with the RDRAM. The RDP component basically just read a FIFO buffer and Rasterize d polygons. The RSP was a DSP , based around 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 system that was quite flexible and malleable 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 was completely programmable, through Microcode (µcode). By altering the microcode run on the device, it could perform different operations, create new effects, and be better tuned for speed or quality. However, Nintendo was unwilling to share the microcode tools with developers until the end of the Nintendo 64's life-cycle. 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 very easy to make mistakes that would be 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 (e.g., Factor 5 , Boss Game Studios , and Rare ). Two of the SGI microcodes
The Nintendo 64 had some 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 4 KiB . This made it extremely difficult to load anything but small textures into the rendering engine, especially textures with high Color Depth , and was the primary cause of blurry graphics. The small texture limitation caused blurring because developers would stretch these small textures to cover a surface and then the console's Bilinear Filtering would blur them even more. To make matters worse, because of how the renderer was designed, if Mipmap ping was used the texture cache was effectively halved to 2 KiB. To put this in perspective, this cache could be quickly filled with even small textures (a 64×64 4-bit/pixel ( Bpp ) texture is 2 KiB and a 128×64 4 bpp texture is 4 KiB). Modern video cards and consoles (2006) frequently deal with 1024 x 1024 8 bpp and larger textures, and have a more flexible texture cache (not always larger). Towards the end of Nintendo 64's lifetime, creative developers 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. Games would often also use plain colored Gouraud Shading instead of texturing on some surfaces, especially in games with themes not targeting realism (e.g., '' Super Mario 64 ''). There were other challenges for developers to work around. Z-buffer ing significantly crippled the RDP's fillrate. Thus, for maximum performance, 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. Most Nintendo 64 games were actually fill-rate 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-intense 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 had very high access latency and this mostly canceled 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. "Inside Nintendo 64" Accessed June 5th, 2007. It was, however, more challenging to program and thus difficult to reach peak performance/quality. One of the best examples of rewritten µcode on Nintendo 64 was Factor 5's N64 conversion of the '' Indiana Jones And The Infernal Machine '' PC game. In this game the Factor 5 team decided they wanted the game to run in high resolution mode (640×480) because of how much they liked the crispness it added. The machine was taxed to the limit running at 640×480 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 4 KiB 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 Real-time 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 real-time 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 '', 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 640×480, 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. Interview: Battling the N64 (Naboo) , IGN64.Com, November 10 2000, retrieved January 18 2006. Color variations The standard Nintendo 64 was dark gray, nearly black. A Jungle Green color was first available with the '''', and had what seemed like a differently colored dark black version of the Nintendo 64. But it is actually the exact same dark gray color as the regular Nintendo 64, and the "Limited Edition" on the box refers to the bundle itself, not the console. Cartridges were usually gray in color, but sometimes they were in different colors as well. '''' had a gold one; and '' Tony Hawk's Pro Skater '', '' Hydro Thunder '', '' Bassmasters 2000 '', '' The World Is Not Enough '', '' WCW Backstage Assault '' and '' Madden NFL 2001 '' had a blue one. Cartridge-copy counter-measures Each Nintendo 64 cartridge contains a so-called lockout chip (similar in spirit to the 10NES ) to prevent manufacturers from creating unauthorized copies of games, and to discourage production of unlicensed 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. During the Boot Process the N64 would compute the checksum of the boot code and verify it with the lockout chip in the game cartridge, failing to boot if the check failed. Some games, such as Banjo Tooie , perform additional checks while running. Backup/development units:
CARTRIDGES VS. DISCS IN HOME GAME CONSOLES > The Nintendo 64 was the last mainstream home video game console to use masked ROM Cartridge s to store its games (although the last cartridge based system to have still continued production was actually SNK 's Neo Geo hardware until 2004 ). Advantages Nintendo cited several advantages for making the N64 cartridge-based:
Disadvantages
Graphics '', showing limited Texture detail and Gouraud Shading (Mario himself).]] Graphically, results of the Nintendo cartridge system were mixed. The N64's graphics chip was capable of Trilinear Filtering , which allowed textures to look very smooth compared to the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation ; neither could provide better than Nearest Neighbor Interpolation , resulting in textures that were highly Pixelated . However, the limited storage size of ROM cartridges limited the number of available textures, resulting in games which had blurry graphics because of the liberal use of stretched, low-resolution textures, which was compounded by the N64's 4096-byte limit on a single texture. Some games, such as ''Super Mario 64'', use a large amount of Gouraud Shading or very simple textures to produce a cartoon-like look. This fit the themes of many games, and allowed this style of imagery a sharp look while hiding the texturing limitations of the machine. 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, though this came at an expense. Production At that time, competing systems from Sony and Sega (the PlayStation and Saturn, respectively) were using CD-ROM discs to store their games. These discs are much cheaper to manufacture and distribute, resulting in lower costs to third party game publishers. As a result many game developers which had traditionally supported Nintendo game consoles were now developing games for the competition because of the higher profit margins found on CD based platforms. Cartridges took much longer to manufacture than CDs, with each production run (from order to delivery) taking 2 to 3 weeks (or more).2 By contrast extra copies of a CD based game could be ordered with a lead time of a few days. This meant that publishers of N64 titles had to attempt to predict demand for a game ahead of its release. They risked being left with a surplus of expensive cartridges for a failed game or a weeks-long shortage of product if they underestimated a game's popularity. 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 higher prices than PlayStation games did. While most PlayStation games rarely exceeded $50, N64 titles could reach $79.99.3 Sony's line of PlayStation Greatest Hits retailed for $19.99 each vs. Nintendo's Player's Choice value line at $39.99 each. In the United Kingdom, prices around the time of introduction for N64 cartridges were £54.99, and PlayStation games at £44.99 for new titles. Nintendo was later fined £100 million for price fixing in Europe. Along with seven other UK based distributors, they were found guilty of maintaining artificially high prices for games from the period 1991–1998. Nintendo fined for price fixing news.bbc.co.uk Outcome The election of the cartridge for the Nintendo 64 was a key factor in Nintendo's being unable to retain its dominant position. Most of the cartridge's advantages did not manifest themselves prominently and they were ending up nullified by the cartridge's shortcomings, which turned off customers and developers alike. Especially for the latter, it was costly and difficult to develop for ROM cartridges, as their limited storage capacity constrained the game's content. Most third-party developers switched to the PlayStation (such as Square and Enix , whose '' Final Fantasy VII '' and '' Dragon Quest VII '' were initially ''pre''-planned for the N64), while some who remained released fewer games to the Nintendo 64 ( Capcom , with only 3 games; Konami , with 13 N64 games and over 50 to the PlayStation), and new game releases were few and far between while new games were coming out rapidly for the PlayStation. Most of the N64's biggest successes were developed by Nintendo itself or by second-parties of Nintendo, such as Rareware. Despite the controversies, the N64 still managed to support many popular games, giving it a long life run. 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 '', '' Nightmare Creatures '', '' Perfect Dark '', '' Doom 64 '', '' Resident Evil 2 '', '' Shadow Man '', '' Conker's Bad Fur Day '' 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. This was not only to deter Piracy but it also reduced the form factor, making it the most compact and portable console of its respective generation. ACCESSORIES First party accessories
Third party accessories
NOTABLE GAMES See Also: List of Nintendo 64 games Player's Choice The Nintendo 64 game library included a number of critically acclaimed IGN N64: Editors' Choice Games , IGN64.Com, accessed December 28 2007 . and widely sold games. These included: The last Nintendo 64 game to be released was '' Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 '' on August 14 , 2002 . Nintendo.com master game list MARKET SHARE The Nintendo 64 was unsuccessful in recapturing the preceding SNES's market share and by the and friend of Shigeru Miyamoto, speculated in 1997 that the N64's lack of popularity in Japan was due to lack of Role-playing Video Game s.6 REFERENCES EXTERNAL LINKS
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