Nintendo 64

File:Nintendo64logo.png

Black ("Charcoal Grey") Nintendo 64 console and controller

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, 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 N64 was first publicly introduced on November 24th, 1995 as the Nintendo Ultra 64 at the 7th Annual Shoshinkai Software Exhibition in Japan. The first published photos from the event were presented on the WWW 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 super computers. 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

File:Ultra64.jpg

The "Ultra 64" logo from Cruis'n USA

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. 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 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 virtual 32-bit color graphics. The N64 development system was an SGI Indy equipped with an add-on board that contained a full N64 system. The N64 was the first console to support mipmapping and anti-aliasing. The N64's main graphical drawback was the lack of memory (cartridge ROM and system RAM) to store texture maps. This forced designers to rely on low resolution texture maps that were heavily blurred by bilinear filtering.

The N64 had a tough time getting titles for a long time since it often lacked essential third party support. Some of Nintendo's most notable games for the N64 are:

• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Star Fox 64
• Paper Mario
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
• Super Smash Bros.
• Super Mario 64
• Wave Race 64
• Mario Kart 64

Super Mario 64 is still considered to have set the standard for 3-D platformer 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.
• Killer Instinct Gold
• Diddy Kong Racing
• GoldenEye 007
• Banjo-Kazooie and its sequel Banjo-Tooie
• Perfect Dark
• Jet Force Gemini
• Donkey Kong 64
• Conker's Bad Fur Day

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 November 16, 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

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. 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 mainly 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 required a cartridge battery whose energy would diminish over time, though the battery generally lasted for years.

While Nintendo chose the cartridge format for the N64, the company originally signed a contract with Sony in 1988 to develop a CD-ROM 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 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 c****x 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. As a result of this, N64 games tended to sell for slightly higher prices than PlayStation games did. While most PlayStation games rarely exceeded $50, N64 titles could reach up to $70-$75.

Despite the controversies, the N64 still managed to support many popular games, giving it a long life run. N64 took 2nd place for its generation of consoles with the PlayStation being 1st. 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.

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 will be the first Nintendo machine to use a standardized storage medium.

Hardware

Specifications

• Processor: Custom 93.75 MHz MIPS R4300i series 64-bit RISC CPU
  • L1 cache: 24 KB
  • Bandwidth: 250 MB/s
  • Operations: 93 MIPs (millions of instructions per second)
  • Manufactured by NEC using 0.35 µm transistor fabrication process
• RAM: 4 MB Rambus RDRAM (upgradeable to 8 MB with Expansion Pak)
  • Bandwidth: 562.5 MB/s
  • Bus: Custom 9-bit Rambus at 500 MHz (max)
• Graphics: SGI 62.5 MHz RCP (Reality Co-Processor) 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: 246x224 to 640x480 pixels flicker-free, interlaced
  • Colors: 16.7 million (32,000 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 cartridges (64 MB with N64DD)
• Dimensions: 10.23 by 7.48 by 2.87 in (260 by 190 by 73 mm) 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.

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 256 kb 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 infamous 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)

The 4 MB Expansion Pak

• Expansion Pak - a memory expansion that plugged into the console's memory expansion port. It contained 4 MB 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.
• 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.

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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.
• 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

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iMac inspired translucent colored N64s

• Standard

The standard Nintendo 64 comes in a dark grey color, often perceived as "black". Officially, it was known as "Charcoal Grey".

• 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

Nintendo released a gold Nintendo 64 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.

• Pokémon Pikachu Nintendo 64

With a large yellow Pikachu model on the top of a blue Nintendo 64, this console was set to promote N64 Pokémon games such as Pokémon Stadium. It has a different footprint than the standard N64 console, and the expansion port is covered. In Japan, a red edition was also released.

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

Super Mario 64		Screenshot Mario Kart 64	Screenshot GoldenEye 007
Super Mario 64 Nintendo (1996)	Wave Race 64 Nintendo (1996)	Mario Kart 64 Nintendo (1997)	GoldenEye 007 Nintendo/Rare (1997)
Screenshot Star Fox 64		Screenshot Diddy Kong Racing
Star Fox 64 Nintendo (1997)	Tetrisphere Nintendo (1997)	Diddy Kong Racing Nintendo/Rare (1998)	1080° Snowboarding Nintendo (1998)
Screenshot Banjo-Kazooie	Screenshot Madden NFL 2001	Screenshot Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask	Screenshot Perfect Dark
Banjo-Kazooie Nintendo/Rare (1998)	Madden NFL 2001 Electronic Arts (2000)	Zelda: Majora's Mask Nintendo (2000)	Perfect Dark Rare (2000)

Miscellaneous

Sales figures

Nintendo claims they have sold over 32 million Nintendo 64 units worldwide. [1]

See also

• Nintendo Systems:
  • Nintendo Entertainment System (1985)
  • Game Boy (1989)
  • Super Nintendo (1991)
  • Virtual Boy (1995)
  • Nintendo 64 (1996)
  • Game Boy Color (1998)
  • Game Boy Advance (2001)
  • Nintendo GameCube (2001)
  • Game Boy Advance SP (2003)
  • Nintendo DS (2004)
  • Game Boy Micro (2005)
  • Nintendo Revolution (2006) Working Title

• List of Nintendo 64 games
• History of video games (32-bit / 64-bit era)

Sources

• http://www.nintendoland.com/home2.htm?n64/n64.htm
• http://www.bramhoo.nl

External links

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• 64DD.net Features a huge N64 game database with media and reviews for every game ever released
• Online N64 cart frequency guide
• Gamefaqs N64 page
• Nintendo's official Nintendo 64 website
• Information about development system
• Pictures of development system in action
• Dextrose Once the home of the main N64 emu developers, with a lot of technical information
• Mupen64, a free, open source N64 emulator
• Coverage of the official unveiling of the Nintendo Ultra 64 at the 7th Annual Shoshinkai Software Exhibition, in Japan
• Hardware and software catalog plus history. N-Sider.com