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This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2007) |
| Nintendo 64 | |
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|---|---|
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| Manufacturer | Nintendo |
| Type | Video game console |
| Generation | Fifth generation (64-bit era) |
| First available | JP June 23 1996 NA September 29 1996 PAL March 1 1997 |
| CPU | 93.75 MHz NEC VR4300 |
| GPU | SGI 62.5 MHz 64-bit RCP |
| Media | Cartridge |
| System storage | Cartridge battery, Controller Pak |
| Online service | RANDnetDD (Japan only) |
| Units sold | Worldwide: 32.93 million (as of March 31 2005) Japan: 5.54 million Americas: 20.63 million Other: 6.75 million2005">05 Nintendo Annual Report - Nintendo Co., Ltd. (PDF) 33. Nintendo (2005-05-26). Retrieved on 2006-08-14. |
| Best-selling game | Super Mario 64, 11.62 millionMario sales data. GameCubicle.com. Retrieved on 2007-10-07. |
| Predecessor | Super Nintendo Entertainment System |
| Successor | Nintendo GameCube |
The Nintendo 64, often abbreviated as N64, is 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 Brazil, in partnership with Gradiente Eletrônica S/A).
The N64 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 later marketed with the slogan: "Get N, or get Out!"
Contents |
The Nintendo 64 was the culmination of work by Nintendo, Silicon Graphics (SGI) , 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.Tom Kalinske Interview. SEGA 16. Retrieved on 2006-12-28. In the early stages of development, the Nintendo 64 was referred to by the code name "Project Reality".[citation needed] This moniker came from the speculation within Nintendo that the console could produce CGI on par with then-current supercomputers. In 1994, the console was given the name Nintendo Ultra 64 in the West.[clarify] The console\'s design was shown for the first time in late Spring 1994. The first picture of the console ever shown featured the Nintendo Ultra 64 logo and showed a game cartridge, but no controller. The final console was identical to this, but with a different logo. When the system together with the controller was fully unveiled in a playable form to the public on November 24, 1995, the console was introduced as the Nintendo 64 in Japan, contrary to speculation of it being called Ultra Famicom,The N64´s Long Way to completion, Nintendoland.com, 1998, accessed December 27, 2006. at the 7th Annual Shoshinkai Software Exhibition in Japan. Photos of the event were disseminated on the web by Game Zero magazine two days later."Coverage of the Nintendo Ultra 64 Debut from Game Zero", Game Zero. Retrieved May 20 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 was 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 drives 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.
The Nintendo 64\'s CPU is a MIPS R4300i-based NEC VR4300.Main specifications of VR4300TM-series. NEC. Retrieved on 2006-05-20. The CPU has been 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. (In this respect, the N64 CPU is similar to the 32-bit Motorola 68000 which is considered a 16-bit architecture, due to its bus limitation.) 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.N64, God of all systems. Google Groups (July 26 1997). Retrieved on 2006-05-20. This was later taken advantage of by emulators such as the UltraHLE and Project64 that had to run on 32-bit PC 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 consists of 4.6 million transistors. The CPU is cooled passively by an aluminium 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. The RSP performs transform, clipping and lighting calculations, and triangle setup.
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 RSP also frequently performs audio functions (although the CPU can be tasked with this as well). It can play back virtually any type of audio (dependent on software codecs) 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 resolutions of 256 × 224, 320 × 240, and 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, like the CPU, is passively cooled 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. 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.
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 KB. 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 mipmapping was used, the texture cache was effectively halved to 2 KB. 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 KB and a 128×64 4 bpp texture is 4 KB). 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-buffering significantly crippled the RDP\'s fillrate. Thus, for maximum performance, managing the z-depth of objects, so objects 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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
One of the best examples of the benefits of custom microcode on the Nintendo 64 was Factor 5\'s N64 port of the Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine PC game. The Factor 5 team wanted the game to run in high resolution mode (640×480) because of the crispness it added to the visuals. The machine was taxed to the limit running at 640×480 so they absolutely needed the best hardware performance possible. 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 KB 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 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, and unsurprisingly, was one of the most advanced games for Nintendo 64.
Factor 5 also showed ingenuity with their Star Wars games such as 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. 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, also implementing 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.Interview: Battling the N64 (Naboo), IGN64.Com, November 10 2000, retrieved January 18 2006.
Cartridges were usually gray in color, but sometimes they were in different colors as well. Tony Hawk\'s Pro Skater 3, Rally Challenge 2000, WWF No Mercy, Killer Instinct, WWF WrestleMania 2000, Rugrats in Paris, Tom Clancy\'s Rainbow Six, Madden NFL 2002, Road Rash 64, Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. and Turok 2: Seeds of Evil had black cartridges; Rayman 2, Turok 2, Battletanx: Global Assault, and Army Men: Sarge\'s Heroes 2 had a green one (in North America only); Donkey Kong 64, Earthworm Jim 3D, and Tony Hawk\'s Pro Skater 2 had yellow ones; Rocket: Robot on Wheels, Spider-Man (2000 video game), All Star Baseball 2001, and NFL Quarterback Club 2001 had red cartridges; Pokémon Stadium 2 had a gold-and-silver cartridge; The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Collector\'s Edition) and The Legend of Zelda: Majora\'s Mask 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. Pokemon Stadium 2 had a silver and gold contrast.
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.
The Nintendo 64 was the last mainstream home video game console to use masked ROM cartridges to store its games (although the last cartridge based system to have still continued production was actually SNK\'s Neo Geo hardware until 2004).
Nintendo cited (1994) Nintendo Power August, 1994 - Pak Watch (in English). Nintendo, 108. several advantages for making the N64 cartridge-based:
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 PlayStation; neither could provide better than nearest neighbor interpolation, resulting in textures that were highly pixelated compared to the N64.
However, the smaller 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 cartridge.
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.
This era\'s competing systems from Sony and Sega (the PlayStation and Saturn, respectively) used 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 who 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).Nintendo\'s new 64-bit platform sets off a scramble for market share. Asiaweek (1997-04-18). Retrieved on 2007-02-09. 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 .[citation needed] Publishers had to pass these higher expenses to the consumer and as a result, 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. (May 2005) "Biggest Blunders". GamePro: 45. 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
The election of the cartridge for the Nintendo 64 was a key factor in Nintendo\'s being unable to retain its dominant position in the gaming market. 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, Duke Nukem 64, Duke Nukem: Zero Hour, and Quake II.
In 2001, the Nintendo 64 was replaced by the disc-based Nintendo GameCube.
A Nintendo 64 controller.
The 4 MB memory Expansion Pak.
The Transfer Pak.
The N64 Disk Drive.
The Nintendo 64 game library included a number of critically acclaimedIGN N64: Editors\' Choice Games, IGN64.Com, accessed December 28 2007. and widely sold games. The last Nintendo 64 game to be released was Tony Hawk\'s Pro Skater 3 on August 14, 2002.[citation needed] 1998\'s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, was nominated by Alex Navarro as one of the greatest games of all time, and, in his words, remains "to this day . . . the finest game I\'ve ever played across any platform or genre" The Greatest Games of All Time - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. GameSpot (2003-06-20).. Its release was exclusive to the Nintendo 64 system, and it was later re-released on the Nintendo GameCube and Wii systems.
The Nintendo 64 was unsuccessful in recapturing the preceding SNES\'s market share and by the fifth generation the market lead was taken over by Sony\'s PlayStation. The PlayStation would eventually tally sales of 100 million units worldwide,PlayStation Business Data. PlayStation.com. Retrieved on 2007-09-05. the N64 came second with 32.93 million units sold,2005" /> and the Sega Saturn came in third with 10 million.SegaBase Volume 6 - Saturn. Eidolons-Inn.net. Retrieved on 2007-07-19. The North American launch on September 29, 1996 (which was actually preceded by an unofficial launch on the 26th)[citation needed] ended with 500,000 N64 units sold in the first four months.Sega Dreamcast Sales Outstrip Expectations in N. America findarticles.com Benimaru Itoh, a developer for EarthBound 64 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 games.Takao Imamura, Shigeru Miyamoto (1997). Nintendo Power August, 1997 - Pak Watch E3 Report "The Game Masters". Nintendo, 104-105.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
| | Nintendo Portal |
| Nintendo video game hardware | |
|---|---|
| Console | Color TV Game • NES (Famicom Disk System • NES 2 • AV Family Computer) • Super NES (Super Game Boy • Satellaview) • Virtual Boy • Nintendo 64 (64DD • iQue Player) • GameCube (WaveBird • Panasonic Q) • Wii |
| Handheld | Game & Watch • Game Boy (Pocket • Light) • Game Boy Color • Game Boy Advance (SP • Micro) • Nintendo DS (Lite) |
| Arcade | Nintendo Classic • Vs. Series • PlayChoice-10 • Nintendo Super System • Triforce |
| Misc. | Nintendo Gateway • R.O.B. • Power Glove • Nintendo optical discs |
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