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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 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!" As of March 31, 2006, the N64 has sold 32.9 million units worldwide.[2][3]
Contents[hide] |
[edit] History
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 faults which MIPS subsequently solved. However, Sega of Japan ultimately decided against SGI's design.[5] In the early stages of development, the Nintendo 64 was referred to by the code name "Project Reality".[6] 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. 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",[7] 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.[8] Official coverage by Nintendo followed 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.[1]
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.[1]
[edit] Market share
The North American launch on September 29, 1996 ended with 500,000 N64 units sold in the first four months.[9] 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 the lack of role-playing video games.[10] As of March 31, 2005, the N64 has sold 5.54 million units in Japan, 20.63 million in the Americas, and 6.75 million in other regions.[11]
Among fifth generation video game consoles, as of 2007, the PlayStation has shipped 102.49 million units worldwide, the most of its generation; production had continued until March 23, 2006.[12][13] The N64 came second with 32.9 million units sold,[2][3] and the Sega Saturn came in third with 9.5 million units sold.[14]
[edit] Hardware
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.[15]
[edit] Central processing unit
The Nintendo 64's central processing unit (CPU) is a MIPS R4300i-based NEC VR4300.[16] 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.[16] (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.[17] 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.[17]
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 aluminum heatspreader that makes contact with a steel heat sink above.[18]
[edit] Memory
The final major component in the system is the memory, also known as 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 caused grief for the game developers because of limited hardware performance.[citation needed]
[edit] Hardware color variations
The standard Nintendo 64 was dark gray, nearly black. A Jungle Green color was first available with the Donkey Kong 64 bundle. The Funtastic Series used brightly-colored, translucent plastic. There were six different Funtastic Series colors: Fire Orange, Grape Purple, Ice Blue, Jungle Green, Smoke Black, and Watermelon Red. Nintendo released a banana-like Nintendo 64 controller for the debut of Donkey Kong 64 in the United States. The Millennium 2000 controller, available exclusively as part of a Nintendo Power promotional contest, was a special silver controller in the United States. It is the only official Nintendo 64 controller to feature all black buttons. The first ever gold controller was released by a contest from the Nintendo Power magazine as part of a drawing. One was also released with shorter "arms" that for most made it hard to use. A gold Nintendo 64 controller was packaged along with the GoldenEye 007 console pack in the United Kingdom. Nintendo 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 PAL markets. The Pokémon Edition Nintendo 64, with a Pokémon sticker on the left side, included the "Pokémon: I Choose You" video. The Pokémon Pikachu Nintendo 64 had a large yellow Pikachu model on a blue Nintendo 64. 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, and orange in Japan. The Limited Edition Star Wars bundle, which was available only during time of release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and came bundled with Star Wars: Episode I Racer, 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.[citation needed]
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 Gold, 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.[citation needed]
[edit] Accessories
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- Nintendo 64 controller – an 'm'-shaped controller with 10 buttons (A, B, C-Up, C-Down, C-Left, C-Right, L, R, Z, and Start), one analog stick in the center, a digital directional pad on the left hand side, and an extension port on the bottom. Initially available in six colors (gray, yellow, green, red, blue, and black) and later in transparent versions of said colors (except gray). The N64 pad's analog stick is notorious for becoming very worn. Also, the analog stick would become uncalibrated if not centered properly when the system was booted up; if the stick was not centered, the game would calibrate with a zero of the altered position. Because this may not be discovered until the player enters the game, a universal software recentering method is printed in every manual (simultaneously pressing the L, R, and START buttons). Early titles such as Wonder Project J2 would lose calibration if the player moved the cursor while accessing the Controller Pak save.[citation needed]
- Controller Pak – a memory card that is plugged into the controller and allowed the player to save game progress and configuration. The original models from Nintendo offered 256 KB battery backed SRAM, split into 123 pages with a limitation of 16 save files, but third party models had much more, often in the form of 4 selectable memory bank of 256KB. The number of pages that a game occupied varied (sometimes, it used the entire card). 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 battery backed SRAM (or EEPROM) found in certain 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 Quest 64).[citation needed]
- Jumper Pak – a filler that plugged into the console's memory expansion port. It serves no functional purpose other than to terminate the RAMBUS bus in the absence of the Expansion Pak. This is functionally equivalent to a continuity RIMM in a RAMBUS motherboard filling the unused RIMM sockets until the user upgrades. Early Nintendo 64 consoles (prior to the Expansion Pak's release) come with the Jumper Pak included and already installed. Jumper Paks were not sold individually in stores and could only be ordered individually through Nintendo's online store.[citation needed]
- Expansion Pak – a memory expansion that plugged into the console's memory expansion port. It contained 4 MB of RAM. Games supporting this accessory include Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage, Gauntlet Legends, Hybrid Heaven, Pokémon Stadium 2, Resident Evil 2, Road Rash 64, Shadow Man, Star Wars: Episode I Racer, and Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, San Francisco Rush 2049, and South Park. Only a handful of games such as Rare's Donkey Kong 64, the single-player mode of Rare's Perfect Dark, the multi-player mode of Blizzard's Starcraft 64 and Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask required it for play. Supporting games usually offered higher video resolutions or higher textures and/or higher color depth. For example, the Nintendo 64 all-remade version of Quake 2 features higher color depth but not a higher resolution when using the Expansion Pak. The Expansion Pak was shipped with certain games and also available separately.[citation needed]
- Rumble Pak – an accessory that plugged into the controller and vibrated during game play. It was released in 1997 alongside Star Fox 64.[citation needed]
- 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 and Pokémon Stadium 2 are games that rely heavily on the Transfer Pak. Both Mario Golf and Mario Tennis also made use of it. 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, and the Transfer Pak was usable only in combination with the Game Boy Color version of Perfect Dark for unlocking bonuses.[citation needed]
[edit] Programming difficulties
The Nintendo 64 had 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 certain surfaces, especially in games with themes not targeting realism (e.g., Super Mario 64).[citation needed]
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 as possible 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.[19]
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.[20]
[edit] Cartridges
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.[citation needed]
The selection 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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
Despite the controversies, the N64 still managed to support popular games such as GoldenEye 007 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, 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.[citation needed]
In 2001, the Nintendo 64 was replaced by the disc-based Nintendo GameCube.[citation needed]
Nintendo cited several advantages for making the N64 cartridge-based.[21] For example, ROM cartridges have very fast load times in comparison to disc based games, as contemporary CD-ROM drives rarely had speeds above 4x. This can be observed from the loading screens that appear in many Sony PlayStation games but are typically non-existent in N64 versions. ROM carts are so much faster than the 2x CD-ROM drives in other consoles that developers could stream data in real-time off them. This was done in Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, for example, to make the most of the limited RAM in N64.[19] Also, 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 and popular mod chips as used on the PlayStation. Compared to the N64, piracy was rampant on the PlayStation. The cartridges are also far more durable than compact discs, the latter which must be carefully used and stored in protective cases. This makes the cartridges better suited for young children who do not know how to take care of CD-ROMs. It also prevents accidental scratches and subsequent read errors.[21] It is possible to add specialized I/O hardware and support chips (such as co-processors) to ROM cartridges, as was done on some SNES games (notably Star Fox, using the Super FX chip).[21]
ROM cartridges also have disadvantages associated with them. While game cartridges are more resistant than CDs to physical damage, they are sometimes less resistant to long-term environmental damage, particularly oxidation or wear of their electrical contacts causing a blank or frozen screen, or static electricity. Console cartridges are usually larger and heavier than optical discs and hence take up more room to store. They also have a more complex manufacturing processes, which meant that games were usually more expensive than their optical counterparts. The cartridges held a maximum of 64 MB of data, whereas CDs held over 650 MB. As fifth generation games became more complex in content, sound, and graphics, it pushed cartridges to the limits of their storage capacity. Games ported from other media had to use data compression or reduced content in order to be released on the N64. Extremely large games could be made to span across multiple discs on CD-based systems, while cartridge games had to be contained within one unit since using an additional cartridge was prohibitively expensive. Because of a cartridge's space limitations, full motion video was not usually feasible for use in cut-scenes. The cut-scenes of some other games used graphics generated by the CPU in real-time.[citation needed]
[edit] Graphics
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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
[edit] Production
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, 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.[citation needed]
Cartridges took much longer to manufacture than CDs, with each production run (from order to delivery) taking 2 to 3 weeks (or more).[22] 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.[citation needed]
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 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.[23] Sony's line of PlayStation Greatest Hits retailed for $19.99 each, while Nintendo's Player's Choice value line had an MSRP of $39.99. 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.[citation needed]
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.[24]
[edit] 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.[citation needed]
[edit] Games
- See also: List of Nintendo 64 games and Player's Choice
The Nintendo 64 game library included a number of critically acclaimed and widely sold games.[25] 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".[26] Its release was exclusive to the Nintendo 64 system, and it was later re-released on the Nintendo GameCube and Wii systems.[26]
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