Nintendo 64

Nintendo 64, or simply N64, is a video game console from Nintendo released on June 23, 1996 in Japan, September 29, 1996 in North America, and finally March 1, 1997 in Europe. The Nintendo 64 was released with only two launch games respectively (three in Europe): Super Mario 64, PilotWings 64 and Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (Europe only).

The system is occasionally referred to as "Project Reality" or "Ultra 64" or simply "64", two names which Nintendo used in press releases prior to the system's launch. The abbreviation "NU64" (Nintendo Ultra 64) is often used in older literature.

The N64 was first introduced in volume # 85 of Nintendo Power magazine.

Introduction

After first announcing the project, two companies, Rareware (UK) and Midway (USA), created arcade games 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). These games were Killer Instinct and Cruis'n USA. 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. This led to extreme hype for the system, which would turn out to completely rely on real time rendering which looked much worse than the pre-rendering used on Killer Instinct. Without the excitement generated by these "false" Nintendo 64 titles however, the Nintendo 64 would have probably sold far less, especially as Nintendo was running so late in bringing out its next generation console. 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). The first console to use an analog joystick was the Emerson Arcadia. And the first to feature four controller ports was the Bally Astrocade.

The system was designed by Silicon Graphics Inc., and features their trademark non 32 bit color dithered real time graphics look. It was the first console to support mip mapping. Its main graphic drawback was due to the lack of ROM to store texture maps, and so the designers overrelied on very low resolution texture maps that were heavily blurred by mipmapping.

While not being home to as many highly rated games as Nintendo's prior console (the Super Famicom (in Japan) and SNES (in North America and Europe), and lacking the essential third party support (which would eventually be its downfall), it still has seen some particularly notable games such as GoldenEye, Super Mario 64, and Ocarina of Time. Super Mario 64 is still considered to have set the standards for 3-D games, and considered by many gamers and developers to be one of the best games ever created.

Apart from Nintendo's own in-house development, Rareware (now second-party to Microsoft's gaming division) also produced a steady stream of popular titles for the Nintendo 64. From their first N64 title, Blast Corps., through GoldenEye, Banjo-Kazooie (and its sequel, Banjo-Tooie), Perfect Dark, Jet Force Gemini, Donkey Kong 64 to the surprisingly adult-themed Conker's Bad Fur Day.

During development, Nintendo 64 was referred to by its code name: Project Atlantis. Once unveiled to the public, the name changed to Ultra 64. Nintendo speculated that this console could reproduce the CGI that present day super computers could produce, dubbing the system as Project Reality. Citing brand recognition, Nintendo changed the name from Ultra 64 to Nintendo 64 and the rest is history.

Cartridges vs. disks

The Nintendo 64 was the last home video game console to use ROM cartridges to store its games. Nintendo defended this choice for the following reasons:

ROM carts have extremely fast load times in comparision to a CD based game. This becomes apparent when you see the loading screens for the PlayStation and not the N64.
ROM carts are difficult to duplicate (to resist unauthorized copying although interface devices for the PC were later deleloped, although much harder than just sticking a CD in the drive as for a PlayStation disc).
It is possible to add specialized support chips (such as coprocessors) to ROM carts.

At that time, competing systems from Sony and Sega were using CD-ROM discs to store their games. These discs are much cheaper to manufacture and distribute, resulting in much lower cost 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. However, most carts store the save games on the cart itself, eliminating the need for seperate and expensive memory cards. As well, the limited storage size of ROM carts limited the amount of textures that could be used in the games, resulting in games which had a more flat shaded look. Later cartridges (such as Resident Evil 2) featured much more ROM space, which demonstrated that N64 was indeed capable of impressive, detailed in-game graphics when the media permitted, but this performance came at a high price.

In 2001, the Nintendo 64 was replaced by the disc based Nintendo GameCube.

Screenshots

Screenshot Super Mario 64		Screenshot Diddy Kong Racing	Screenshot GoldenEye 007
Super Mario 64	Wave Race 64	Diddy Kong Racing	GoldenEye 007
Nintendo (1996)	Nintendo (1996)	Nintendo/Rare (1997)	Nintendo/Rare (1997)

	Screenshot Banjo-Kazooie	Screenshot Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask	Screenshot Madden NFL 2001
1080° Snowboarding	Banjo-Kazooie	Zelda: Majora's Mask	Madden NFL 2001
Nintendo (1998)	Nintendo/Rare (1998)	Nintendo (2000)	Electronic Arts (2000)

Hardware

Specifications

93.75 MHz MIPS 64-bit RISC CPU (low-cost R4300 series, 32-bit external bus)
RCP (Reality Control Processor) maps hardware registers to memory addresses and contains:
- 62.5 MHz RSP (parallel processor, mostly used for sound and graphics)
- RDP (pixel drawing processor) Z buffer, anti-aliasing, and realistic texture mapping (tri-linear filtered MIP-map interpolation, perspective correction, and environment mapping)
Ram: RAMBUS D-RAM 36Mbit
Media: 32 to 512 megabit cartridge
Controller: 1 analog joystick; 2 shoulder buttons; one digital cross pad; six face buttons, 'start' button, and one digital trigger.

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 256 kb Flash RAM, split into 123 pages, but third party models had much more. The number of pages that a game occupied varied.
Extension Pak - a memory extension that plugged into the console's extension port. It contained 4 MB of RAM. Only few games supported the extension, and usually offered higher graphics resolutions when it was present.
Rumble Pak - an accessory that plugged into the controller and vibrated during gameplay. Has since its release in 1997 alongside Starfox 64 become built-in standard function among the handcontrollers of the current era's home consoles (PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox).
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 upon the use of 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 disk drive that was a commercial failure and consequently never released outside of Japan. It featured networking capabilities similar to the Super Famicom's Satellaview.

External links