Nintendo 64
From GamerWiki
 Nintendo 64
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| Manufacturer: | Nintendo |
| Alternate Names: | N64 (widely used abbreviation) Project Reality, Ultra 64, Ultra NES (development names) |
| Announced: | date the console was announced |
| Release date: | JP: 23/June/1996 NA: 29/September/1996 EU: 1/March/1997 AU: 1/March/1997 |
| Initial Price: | JP: ? NA: $299 EU: £299 AU: ? |
| Discontinued: | 2001 |
Other games available (temporary link)
Contents |
Overview
The Nintendo 64 (N64) is a console created by Nintendo and released in 1996, with the flagship title Mario 64. This game is considered to be one of the most historically significant as it was the first fully 3-dimensional platform game. It also included changeable viewpoints and revisited levels through multiple objectives. Other notable games are a series of 3D platform games by Rare (which was partly owned by Nintendo at the time) - Banjo Tooie, Banjo Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64 and Conker's Bad Fur Day. Rare also released Diddy Kong Racing and the highly popular Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. The latter two games in particular are often mentioned in 'best game ever' lists, as is Nintendo's own 'Ocarina of Time'. A sequel, Majora's Mask, was also released on the N64.
The N64 controller had a variety of features which were later adopted by other console manufactures, including innovations such as the Rumble Pak and the Analog Stick. It was also the first console whereby addons could be plugged into the controller, as later found on the Sega Dreamcast and Microsoft Xbox.
Nintendo fans, as a whole, are probably some of the most passionate videogame fans. Some have considered the reasons for the N64's lesser sales compared to the Sony Playstation. One reason given is that the N64 continued to use cartridges whereas the Sony Playstation used CDs. Whilst this might be partly true (and the attraction of the ease of illegal piracy with CDs should not be forgotten), given that the Dreamcast, by Sega, also used CDs and sold considerably less than the N64, it seems that other factors must also have made a significant impact. The track record of Sega in the preceding years could have affected the Dreamcast's popularity (the Saturn's narrow range of games seemed to appeal more to hardcore players than the Mega Drive did). This did not apply to Nintendo, though, whose SNES had been continued to be greatly popular worldwide up until 1995. The Playstation's success in the console wars also appears to be down to a combination of 'coolness' (tapping into the 'nightclub culture' and the new appetite for grown up 'Play'), a 'grown-up' name (Sony) that appealed to older players and people who had never or rarely played videogames before and a minimalist, sober design that fit in with the design tastes of the 1990s. Sony also marketed their console suggesting a sexy, 'underground' or aspirational lifestyle, rather than the day-glo colours of Mario. The Playstation's tagline was 'Do not underestimate the power of Playstation'. The wide range of games, often for a cheaper price than Sony's competitors, may have helped too. The Playstation did have a few quirky titles, particularly in Japan, but often it is the mass market, often multi-format, games that most readily trip off Playstation gamers tongues.
The N64 was succeeded by the GameCube in 2002. The Gamecube was the first Nintendo console to not launch with either a Mario or Zelda title (although Luigi's Mansion featured Mario). It used smaller propriatry CDs, which made piracy virtually impossible.
Technical Specs.
- Processor: Custom 93.75 MHz MIPS R4300i series 64-bit
- L1 cache: 24KB
- Bandwidth: 250 MB/s
- Operations: 93 MIPs (millions of instructions/sec)
- Manufactured by NEC Corporation using 0.35µ transistor fabrication process
- Ram: 4MB Rambus RDRAM (Upgradeable to 8MB with Expansion Pak)
- Bandwidth: 562.5 MB/s
- Bus: Custom 9-bit Rambus at 500MHz (max)
- Graphics: Silicon Graphics 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: 256x224 to 640x480 pixels flicker-free, interlaced
- Colors: 16.7 Million (32,000 on screen)
- 150,000 Polygons/sec (all RDP features enabled)
- Sound: 16-bit ADPCM Stereo
- Channels: 100 PCM (max, 16-24 avg.)
- Sampling: 48kHz (max, 44.1kHz is CD quality)
- Media: 4MB to 64MB cartridges (64MB with N64DD)
- Dimensions: 10.23" x 7.48" x 2.87" (260mm x 190mm x 73mm ) WxDxH
- Weight: 2.42lb (1.1kg)
- Controller: 1 analog stick; 2 shoulder buttons; one digital cross pad; six face buttons, 'start' button, and one digital trigger.
Cartridges
The Nintendo 64 was the last major home system to use ROM cartridges and some believe this is why the N64 was never as successful as the Sony PlayStation. The Sony PlayStation used the CD-ROM format and many people viewed this as an advantage as it allowed more information to be stored than realistically available on cartridges at the time - a CD-ROM can store over 700 megabytes of data, compared to only 64 megabytes (256 Megabit) for an N64 cartridge. For the gamer, this means games can include FMV, as seen in the popular Final Fantasy series.
Another major issue is cost - it's much cheaper to distribute games on CD-ROM, with CD-ROM disks costing pennies compared to the relative expensive of manufacturing a cartridge. The cost of cartridges meant that games such as Turok cost £69.99 on launch, around double the price of the average PlayStation game.
However, there were some advantages to the N64 using cartridges. For example, games loaded much quicker, typically with shorter loading screens than their Sony PlayStation equivalents. Custom chips also could be added to the cartridge to allow for larger capacity and special functions such as co-processors. In most instances, games could also save directly to the cartridge without needing a memory card.
Games
A full list of Nintendo 64 games documented on GamerWiki can be found at the Nintendo 64 category.
Alternatively, a manually created list is also available - this is to be deprecated, so please add any further games to the games to be added page.
This article uses source material obtained from Wikipedia The original article can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64
