Nintendo's third home video game console for the international market was the Nintendo 64 (N64), named for its 64 bit processor. The console was released on 23 June 1996 in Japan; 29 September 1996 in North America and Brazil; 1 March 1997 in Europe and Australia; and 1 September 1997 in France.
The console was released in Japan with three launch games (Super Mario 64, Saikyou Haniu Shogi and Pilotwings), whilst those in North America and Europe were bundled with just Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings. The North American launch was a great success, with a record-breaking half a million units sold during the first 24 hours.
Despite the success of the launch, the N64 was unsuccessful in recapturing its predecessor's (the SNES) market share, with the Sony PlayStation gaining over 51% of the market. By the time the Nintendo 64 ceased production in 2002, it had sold 32.93 million units worldwide.
Hardware
The system was powered by 64-bit processor MIPS R4300i-based NEC VR4300 clocked at 93.75 MHz. It was the first console to use a unified memory subsystem, instead of having separate banks of memory for CPU, video and audio. The new controller consisted of an analogue stick, a digital cross pad, 2 shoulder buttons, a 'start' button, 6 face buttons and one digital trigger (Z).
However, unlike the competing systems from Sega and Sony (the Saturn and PlayStation, respectively), the N64 used cartridges rather than CD-ROM discs to store its games, and in fact was the last mainstream home video game console to do so. Nintendo cited several advantages for making the N64 cartridge-based:
- Faster load speed: ROM carts had very fast load times in comparison to disc based games.
- ROM cartridges were expensive and difficult to duplicate, thus helping to prevent piracy.
- Specialised support chips could be added to cartridges (such as the Super FX chip).
- Cartridges could store individual game progress and profiles on the cartridge itself, eliminating the need for separate and expensive memory cards.
- ROM cartridges were more robust than CD-ROMs, making them a better choice for children, and preventing read errors from even minor damage.
- There were no moving parts with a ROM cartridge system, and so no mechanism to fail.
However, critics argued that cartridges:
- were much more expensive to produce and distribute
- were less resistant to long-term environmental damage, particularly oxidation or wear of their electrical contacts
- were larger than optical discs and therefore need more storage space
- contained significantly less data than DVDs or CDs, meaning that some games' content had to be reduced in order to run on the N64
- were unable to contain full motion video for use in cutscenes (due to space limitations)
The high cost of manufacturing and distributing cartridges and the fact that their limited storage capacity constrained the game's content, made CD-ROMs much more attractive to third party game publishers. As a result, many game developers that had traditionally supported Nintendo began to develop games for the competition in order to achieve the higher profit margins found on CD based platforms. Consequently, the majority of the N64's games were developed by Nintendo themselves or by second-parties of Nintendo, such as Rareware.
One of the most notable developers that abandoned the Nintendo platform was Square, who produced the successful Final Fantasy series. Instead of releasing the latest instalment (Final Fantasy VII) on the N64 as originally planned, their released it for the Sony PlayStation, where it became the most popular game of the series, and went on to become one of the highest selling games for the console.
The graphics chip used by the N64 was capable of trilinear filtering, which made textures look very smooth compared to the Sony PlayStation and the Sega Saturn. However, because of the limited space on the cartridges, the amount of available textures was reduced, resulting in the use of stretched, low-resolution textures that produced blurry graphics. Many games used very simple textures or a high amount of Gouraud shading to produce a cartoon-like look (for example, Super Mario 64), which gave the images a sharp look whilst hiding the texturing limitations of the machine. Later cartridges had more ROM space, and games such as Resident Evil 2 demonstrated that console was capable of detailed in-game graphics when the media permitted.
Games
Despite the controversy over their cartridge-based system, the N64 still managed to support many popular games, particularly Nintendo's first-party franchises, such as Mario and Zelda, which appeared exclusively on Nintendo platforms. The Nintendo 64 game library included a number of widely sold and critically acclaimed and games. Some of the most popular included:
- 1080 Snowboarding
- Banjo-Kazooie
- Banjo-Tooie
- Conker's Bad Fur Day
- Diddy Kong Racing
- Donkey Kong 64
- F-Zero X
- GoldenEye 007
- Mario Kart 64
- Paper Mario
- Perfect Dark
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- Space Station Silicon Valley
- Star Fox 64
- Star Wars: Battle for Naboo
- Super Mario 64
- Super Smash Bros.
- The Legend of Zelda:
Majora's Mask - The Legend of Zelda:
Ocarina of Time - Turok 2: Seeds of Evil
- Wave Race 64
- World Driver Championship
- Yoshi's Story
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The last N64 game released In Europe was Mario Party 3 released on 16 November 2001, whilst the last North American game was Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 on August 20, 2002.
Accessories
There were many first- and third-part accessories developed for the Nintendo 64; these included the following:
N64 Controller
An M-shaped controller with 10 buttons (A, B, C-Up, C-Down, C-Left, C-Right, L, R, Z and Start), a digital directional pad on the left hand side, an analogue stick in the centre, and an extension port on the bottom. The controller was originally available in six colours (grey, green, yellow, blue, red and black) and later in transparent version of these colours (other than grey).
Controller Pak
A memory card that plugged into the controller and allowed the player to save configuration and game progress. Models from Nintendo offered 256 KB Flash RAM, whilst third party models offered much more, often in the form of compressed memory.
Expansion Pak
A memory expansion that plugged into the console's memory expansion port to provide an addition 4 MiB of RAM for games such as Donkey Kong 64, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and Perfect Dark. Other games that supported the expansion included Hybrid Heaven, Turok 2, Star Wars: Episode I Racer and Quake 2, which usually gave them higher video resolutions or higher textures and/or higher colour depth.
Jumper Pak
A filler that plugged into the console's memory expansion port in order to complete the N64's internal circuit in the absence of the Expansion Pak. The majority of early Nintendo 64 consoles came with the Jumper Pak included and already installed.
Rumble Pak
An accessory that plugged into the controller and vibrated during game play. Since its release, it has become a built-in standard for the many current generation console controllers.
Transfer Pak
An accessory that plugged into the controller and allowed the N64 to transfer data between N64 and Game Boy games such as Pokémon Stadium, Mario Golf and Mario Tennis.
64DD
A disk drive that featured networking capabilities. The 64DD was a commercial failure and was consequently never released outside of Japan.
VRU (Voice Recognition Unit)
A device that connected into controller port 4 of the system to play the game "Hey You, Pikachu!". The device contained a microphone that enabled players to talk to Pikachu.
Dance Pad
A dance pad packaged with "Dance Dance Revolution: Disney Dancing Museum", released only in Japan.
Game Shark
A third-party cheat device made by Interact.
Sharkwire Online Keyboard
Another third-party made by Interact that added a PC style keyboard and modem to enable Game Shark updates and emailing.
GB Hunter
An adaptor that enabled users to play Game Boy and Game Boy Colour games on the N64.
Bio Sensor
A device that was released in Japan only, which used an ear-clip to measure the user's heart rate. This was used with the game "Tetris 64" which slowed down or speeded up depending on how fast the player's heart was beating.
Specifications
Custom CPU
- Custom 64-bit MIPS R4300i-class RISC CPU (93.75 MHz)
- 64-bit data path, registers, buffer
- 5-stage pipeline
- CPU Benchmarks
- 125 Dhrystone MIPS (93 million operations/sec)
- 60 SPECint92
- 45 SPECfp92
Co-Processor
- Custom 64-bit MIPS RISC "Reality Immersion" RCP (62.5 MHz)
- Built-in Audio/Video Vector Processor (RSP)
- RCP Benchmarks
- Over half a billion (500,000,000) operations/sec
- 10 times more than some Pentium engines
- Built-in Pixel Drawing Processor (RDP) takes care of:
- Advanced Texture-Mapping
- Detail Texturing
- Tri-linear Mip Map Interpolation
- Perspective Correction
- Environment Mapping
- Depth Buffering
- Up to 150,000 polygons per second with the following features :
- Color Combiner
- Anti-Aliasing and Blending
- Rasterizing
- Z-Buffering
- Automatic LOD Management
- Vertex positioning and transformations
- Depth, color and texture clipping
- Transparency (256 levels max)
- Gouraud Shading
Processor/Co-Processor Engine
- Contains Over 4 Million Transistors Total
- Manufactured by NEC
- Based on .35 Micron Process
Memory
- 4 Megabytes (36 megabits) total RAM
- Rambus DRAM subsystem , transfer up to 562.5 MBytes/sec
- Custom 9-bit Rambus Bus (to the DRAM) running at 500 MHz max
- Internal data bus to the RCP is 128-bit
Video
- Video Output
- RF
- Stereo A/V
- S-Video
- HDTV
- Video and Resolution:
- 21-bit colour output
- 32-bit RGBA Pixel Colour Frame Buffer
- Maximum: 16.8 million colours, 32-Bit RGBA
- Pixel Colour Frames Buffer Support
- 21-Bit colour video output
- 16.8 million colours available
- 32,000 colours on screen at once
Sound
- Stereo 16-bit
- ADPCM Compression
- Up to 100 PCM channels, with average number of channels 16-24
- Wavetable Synthesis
- Sampled at 48 KHz max
- Internal Special Effects
- Voice (w/ Pitch Shifting)
- Gain and Pan
- Reverb and Chorus
- External (software) Effects Supported
Controller Ports
- Four controller ports
- Three-prong feed
Controllers
- Digital joypad at left
- Analog stick in middle
- Six buttons on the right
- Two 'B' and 'A' buttons
- Four "C Group" buttons
- Two 'L' and 'R' buttons on top
- One "Z Trigger" button on the bottom
- Memory card port on back
- Initial memory packs start out at 256k, with up to 2 MB available
Expansion Options
- Cartridge Slot
- Controller Ports
- Extension Port (bottom)
- Memory Expansion option (top front)
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