parent nodes: N64
Nintendo 64 or simply N64 is a video game console from Nintendo released on June 23, 1996 in Japan and September 29, 1996 in North America. The Nintendo 64 was released with only two launch games: Super Mario 64 and PilotWings 64. The system is occasionally refered to as "Project Reality" or "Ultra 64", two names that which Nintendo used in press releases prior to the system's launch.
After first announcing the project, two US companies called Rare and Midway created arcade games which supposedely used the Ultra 64 hardware. These were Killer Instinct and Cruisin' USA. Killer Instinct was the most advanced game of its time graphically, featuring pre-rendered movie backgrounds. This led to extreme hype for the system, which would turn out to completely rely on real time rendering which looked much worse then 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. Nintendo touted many of the systems more unusual features as groundbreaking and innovative. But many of these features had in fact been implement before. The first game console with a 64-bit architecture was actually the Atari Jaguar. 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 and features their trademark non 32 bit color dithered real time graphics look. It was the first console to support mip mapping.
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. Games such as GoldenEye, Super Mario 64, and Ocarina of Time are still considered by some gamers to be among the greatest games of all time.
Apart from Nintendo's own in-house development, Rareware (now second-party to Microsoft's gaming division) has also produced a steady stream of popular titles for Nintendo 64. From their first N64 title, Blast Corps., through GoldenEye, Banjo-Tooie, Perfect Dark, Jet Force Gemini, Donkey Kong 64 to the more recent Conker's Bad Fur Day.
Specifications
93.75 MHz MIPS 64-bit RISC CPU (customized R4000 series)
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)
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.
Demise
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 very fast load times.
ROM carts are difficult to duplicate (resist piracy).
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. As well, the limited storage size of roms limited the amount of textures that could be used in the games, resulting in games which had a more flat shaded look. With the high resolution textures possible with a CD storage medium, the Nintendo 64 could have looked almost as good as a Dreamcast.
In 2001 the N64 was replaced by the Nintendo GameCube.