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Nintendo 64

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Nintendo 64
File:Nintendo64logo.png
ManufacturerNintendo
TypeVideo game console
GenerationFifth generation
LifespanJune 23, 1996 (Japan)
Units sold32 million
MediaCartridge
CPU93.75 MHz NEC VR4300
Online servicesRANDnetDD (Japan only)
Best-selling gameSuper Mario 64
PredecessorSNES
SuccessorNintendo GameCube

The Nintendo 64, commonly called the N64, is Nintendo's third home video game console for the international market. The N64 was released on June 23, 1996 in Japan, September 29, 1996 in North America and Puerto Rico, March 1, 1997 in Europe/Australia and September 1, 1997 in France. It was released with only two launch games in Japan and North America (Super Mario 64 and PilotWings 64) while Europe had a third launch title in the form of Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (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 November 24, 1995 as the Nintendo Ultra 64 at the 7th Annual Shoshinkai Software Exhibition in Japan (though preview pictures from the Nintendo "Project Reality" console had been published in American magazines as early as June 1993). The first published photos from the event were presented on the web via coverage by Game Zero magazine two days after the event.[1] 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 supercomputers. 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, Konami.

Introduction

File:Ultra64.jpg
The "Ultra 64" logo from Cruis'n USA

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 drives 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.

Notable games

Nintendo 64 is perhaps best known for one of its launch titles, Super Mario 64, which 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.

  • Some of Nintendo's most notable games for the N64 are:
Mario Kart 64 Mario Party Paper Mario
Star Fox 64 Super Smash Bros. Super Mario 64
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask F-Zero X
Wave Race 64 Mario Golf
  • Rare Ltd. produced a steady stream of titles for the N64. Some of their more popular titles include:
Blast Corps. Banjo-Kazooie Perfect Dark
Conker's Bad Fur Day Diddy Kong Racing Donkey Kong 64
GoldenEye 007 Jet Force Gemini

Also notable were the first releases of the Turok: Dinosaur Hunter franchise. The first game, entitled Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, was a smash hit in the console first person shooter genre by introducing the new viewpoint of a Native American hunter in a science-fantasy environment, offering a unique game experience at the time. Its sequel, Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, was generally lauded as being a worthy successor to the original by offering a refined version of the same gameplay. Turok: Rage Wars was a Turok title designed as a pure multiplayer title and received good reviews. N64 saw one more release, Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion, but this one was not as highly recommended because it controversially shifted game design away from the earlier titles.

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

File:N64-cartridge.jpg
The cartridge for Mario Kart 64

The Nintendo 64 was the last mainstream home video game console to use ROM cartridges to store its games (although the last real cartridge based system to have still continued production was SNK's Neo Geo hardware until 2004). Nintendo's choice had several advantages:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. It is possible to add specialized support chips (such as coprocessors) to ROM cartridges, as was done on some SNES games.
  4. Most cartridges store individual profiles and game progress on the cartridge itself, eliminating the need for separate and expensive memory cards. 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 EEPROMs 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 and also a part of games' sales profits, 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, and lo-res sprites (such as the trees from Super Mario 64). 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 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. The cartridge vs. disc debate came to an infamous climax during the release of Final Fantasy VII. Despite the fact that all six previous Final Fantasy games had been published on Nintendo systems, the series' producer, Square (known as Squaresoft at the time), chose to release Final Fantasy VII on the Sony PlayStation. This incident provided a highly-publicized denunciation of Nintendo's cartridge-based system which caused negative publicity for Nintendo. The incident also led to Square and Nintendo not working together on a project until Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles 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 operations.

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

  • Fast3D microcode: < ~100,000 polygons per second
  • Turbo3D microcode: 500,000-600,000 polygons per second with PlayStation quality. Nintendo never allowed this code to be used in shipping games.
File:Conker1.jpg
Conker's superior texturing

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 textures 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 bilinear filtering and limited ROM storage. To make matters worse, because of how the renderer was designed, if mipmapping 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-Buffering 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.

File:Naboo1.jpg
Battle for Naboo's draw distance

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 formats 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, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron and Star Wars: Battle for Naboo, 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

A Nintendo-brand Controller Pak
  • Controller Pak - a memory card that plugged into the controller and allowed the player to save game progress and configuration. The original models from Nintendo offered 256KB Flash RAM, split into 123 pages, but third party models had much more, often in the form of compressed memory. The number of pages that a game occupied varied. A Controller Pak was initially useful or even necessary for the earlier N64 games. Over time, the Controller Pak lost ground to the convenience of a back-up battery (or flash memory) found in some cartridges. Games by Konami often required the Controller Pak for saves, even though the games could have easily contained three or more save-slots (such as in the case of Holy Magic Century)
The 4MB memory Expansion Pak
  • Expansion Pak - a memory expansion that plugged into the console's memory expansion port. It contained 4MB of RAM. Only a few games such as Perfect Dark, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, and Midway's San Francisco Rush: 2049 supported the expansion, while games such as Donkey Kong 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask required it for play. Supporting games usually offered higher video resolutions when it was present, or in the case of Perfect Dark, unlocked 100% of game play. The expansion pack was shipped with some games and also available separately. Mad Catz marketed its own version of Expansion Pak called the High Rez Pack doing the same job for less money, though there were reports of overheating due to inferior quality.
  • Rumble Pak - an accessory that plugged into the controller and vibrated during game play. It has (since its release in 1997 alongside Star Fox 64) become a built-in standard for the current generation console controllers.
Transfer Pak
  • Transfer Pak - an accessory that plugged into the controller and allowed the Nintendo 64 to transfer data between Game Boy and N64 games. Pokémon Stadium is a game that relies heavily on the Transfer Pak. Rare's Perfect Dark was initially going to be compatible with the Transfer Pak in order to use pictures taken with the Game Boy Camera in the game but this function was scrapped.
File:64dd.jpg
The N64 Disk Drive
  • 64DD - The official N64 Disk Drive attachment was a commercial failure and was consequently never released outside of Japan. It featured networking capabilities similar to the SNES Satellaview.
  • The Wide-Boy64 an adapter similar to the Super Game Boy and was able to play Game Boy games. However, it was only released to the developers and the press. Third party adapters allowed regular consumers to do the same.

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 Goldeneye 007 console pack in the United Kingdom in 1997. Nintendo also released a gold controller for the debut of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 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.[4]

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:

Market share

With 32 million Nintendo 64 units sold worldwide,[5] Nintendo was unsuccessful in recapturing the preceding Super Nintendo Entertainment System's market share and the fifth generation was taken over by the PlayStation which had sold over 100 million units worldwide. But the N64 secured the second place in the market, outselling the Sega Saturn (10 million).

The reason for this may have been that it was more costly and difficult to develop for ROM cartridges when compared to PlayStation's CDs, and cartridges store far less data, constraining a game's content. Most third-party developers went working with the PlayStation (such as Square, whose Final Fantasy VII was initially 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 themselves or by second-parties of Nintendo, such as Rareware.

Trivia

  • Although Nintendo 64 was touted as being a 64-bit machine (the CPU is fully capable of this), the games rarely use 64-bit instructions. The greater precision or range available with 64-bit data types is not typically required by 3D games, and 64-bit data uses twice as much RAM, cache, and bandwidth thereby reducing performance. In addition, the cost-reduced NEC VR4300 CPU used in N64 has only 32-bit buses whereas more powerful MIPS CPUs are equipped with 64-bit buses.[6][7]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Coverage of the Nintendo Ultra 64 Debut from Game Zero", Game Zero. Retrieved May 20, 2006.
  2. ^ "N64 Bilinear filtering hack", Beyond3D Forum, December 10, 2002. Retrieved May 20, 2006.
  3. ^ "Perspective Corrected Texture Mapping", GameDev.net, July 16, 1999. Retrieved May 20, 2006.
  4. ^ Template:Nl icon "Geschiedenis van de Nintendo 64", mario64.nl. Retrieved May 20, 2006.
  5. ^ System: Nintendo 64, Nintendo. Retrieved May 20, 2006.
  6. ^ "N64, God of all systems", Google Groups, July 26, 1997. Retrieved May 20, 2006.
  7. ^ "Main specifications of VR4300TM-series", NEC. Retrieved May 20, 2006.

Sources

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