Nintendo 64

The Nintendo 64, commonly called the N64, is Nintendo's third home video game console. The N64 was released on June 23, 1996 in Japan, September 29, 1996 in North America and Puerto Rico, 1 March 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. 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.

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 drives and TMS processors. Killer Instinct was the most advanced game of its time graphically, featuring pre-rendered movie backgrounds which 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 (although the truth of this is disputed, as the Jaguar merely had two 32-bit processors- albeit 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:

• 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
• Wave Race 64
• Banjo-Kazooie

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:

• Blast Corps.
• Banjo-Kazooie and its sequel Banjo-Tooie
• Conker's Bad Fur Day
• Diddy Kong Racing
• Donkey Kong 64
• GoldenEye 007
• Jet Force Gemini
• Killer Instinct Gold
• Perfect Dark

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, 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 cartridges to store its games. 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 virtually 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. Nintendo later backed out of the contract due to Sony's insistence that they would receive all licensing revenue for games released on CD-ROM. 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. Sony reportedly kept the name for their later 32-bit system to spite Nintendo. Nintendo sued Sony over the PlayStation name, although they later settled. Nintendo later approached the Dutch electronics giant Philips to develop a Super NES CD-ROM drive, but that deal also went nowhere.

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 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, Squaresoft, 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 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. The Nintendo Revolution uses "12cm discs" for storage, which are just encrypted DVDs, thus making it the first Nintendo console to use a standardized storage format.

Hardware

Specifications

• Processor: 93.75 MHz NEC VR4300 (info), based on MIPS R4300i series 64-bit RISC CPU
  • L1 cache: 24 KB (split: 16 KB instruction, 8 KB data)
  • Bus Width: 32-bit address and data
  • Instruction Set: MIPS R4000 64-bit
  • Addressable Memory Space: 4 GB (Virtual 1 TB)
  • Bandwidth: 250 MB/s
  • Operations: 93 MIPS (millions of instructions per second)
  • On-chip memory management unit (MMU)
  • 4.6 million transistors
  • Manufactured by NEC using 0.35µm transistor fabrication process
• RAM: 4 MB RDRAM (upgradeable to 8 MB with 4MB Expansion Pak)
  • Bandwidth: 562.5 MB/s
  • Data path: Custom 9-bit Rambus at 500 MHz (max)
• Graphics: SGI 62.5MHz RCP (Reality Coprocessor) contains two sub-processors:
  • RSP (Reality Signal Processor) controls 3D graphics and sound functions
  • RDP (Reality Drawing Processor) handles all pixel drawing operations in hardware, such as:
    • Z-buffering (maintains 3D spatial relationships, is Mario in front of the tree or vice-versa?)
    • Anti-aliasing (smoothes jagged lines and edges)
    • Texture mapping (placing images over shapes, for example mapping a face image to a sphere creates head)
      • Trilinear Filtered Mipmap Interpolation (increases texture map rendering speed)
      • Perspective correction
      • Environment mapping
  • Resolution: 256x224 to 640x480 pixels flicker-free, interlaced
  • Colors: 16.7 million (32,768 on-screen)
  • 150,000 polygon/s (all RDP features enabled)
• Sound: 16-bit ADPCM Stereo
  • Channels: 100 PCM (max, 16-24 avg.)
  • Sampling: 48 kHz (max, 44.1 kHz is CD-quality)
• Media: 4 MB to 64 MB (32-Mbit to 512-Mbit) cartridges
• Dimensions: 10.23 x 7.48 x 2.87 inches (260 x 190 x 73mm) WxDxH
  • Weight: 2.4 lb (1.1 kg)
• Controller: 1 analog stick; 2 shoulder buttons; one digital cross pad; six face buttons, 'start' button, and one digital trigger.

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 N64 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 N64's lifecycle when they shared this information with a select number of companies. Programming RSP microcode was said to be quite difficult because the N64 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 PSX quality. Nintendo never allowed this code to be used in shipping games.

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 N64'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 mip mapping 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 N64'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 N64's low ~100,000 polygon per second rating during its time. In fact, World Driver Championship was one of the most polygon-loaded N64 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 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 N64'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.

Still, with these drawbacks to the hardware, the machine was architecturally superior in nearly every way 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 N64 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 N64. For starters, the Z-buffer could not be used because it alone used up 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 more lighting than even 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 was one of the most advanced games for Nintendo 64.

Factor 5 also showed ingenuity with their Star Wars games, Rogue Squadron and Battle for Naboo, where their team again used custom microcode. In Rogue Squadron the team tweaked the microcode for a landscape engine to create the alien worlds. Then for Naboo they took what they learned from Rogue and pushed the machine even farther to make the game run at 640x480, and implement enhancements for both particles and the landscape engine. Naboo enjoyed an impressive draw distance and large amounts of snow and rain even with the high resolution, thanks to their efforts.

Accessories

• 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 were particularly notorious as they often required the controller Pak to save even though the games could have easily contained three or more save-slots (such as in the case of Holy Magic Century)

• 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 and Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 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 - 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.

• 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.
• Adapters to play Game Boy games - there is an unofficial adaptor to play Game Boy cartridges, similar to the Super Game Boy and an official adapter, able to play Game Boy Color games (never released).

Colored/Special Systems

Standard

Funtastic Series

Banana

Gold

Pokémon Pikachu Nintendo 64

Clear Blue and Red

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:

• Doctor V64 and Doctor V64jr, by Bung Enterprises Ltd
• Z64, by Harrison Electronics
• CD64, by Success Compu.

Screenshots

Market Share

With 32 million Nintendo 64 units sold worldwide [2], Nintendo was unsuccessful in recapturing the preceding SNES's market share and the fifth generation was taken over by the PlayStation which had sold over 100 million units worldwide. But the N64 guaranteed the second place in the market, easily outselling the Sega Saturn (10 million).