The Nintendo 64 - also known under code names Project Reality and Ultra 64 at the time of its phase of development - is a video game console, exit in 1996 (1997 in Europe), of the Japanese manufacturer Nintendo in collaboration with Silicon Graphics. It was the last of the consoles of fifth generation with being left, in competition with the Sega Saturn and the Playstation.

History

It is at the time of the Tokyo Game Show of 1993 that one intended to speak for the first time about Nintendo 64. At the time Nintendo just came to give up the project of reader CD-ROM for his Super Nintendo in collaboration with Sony: the Playstation. Nintendo had then announced at the time of the TGS 1993 the development of a new console, code name Project Reality , in collaboration with the american company Silicon Graphics, specialized in the imagery of synthesis. According to Nintendo the Project Reality would be the most powerful console ever carried out with a computing power close to that of the work stations Silicon Graphics on which the special effects of Terminator 2 had been carried out or Jurassic Park , a world exit is announced for 1995.

During the year 1994, collaboration with Silicon Graphics is concretized with the appearance of the play Donkey Kong Country , calculated on the work stations of Silicon Graphics and which pushes back the limits of the Super Nintendo. It is also into 1994 that Nintendo announces the final name of its console: Ultra 64 . This name comes owing to the fact that the console will use a “surpuissant” processor 64 bits (according to Nintendo), vis-a-vis the other concurrent machines 32 bits, on the other hand Ultra the 64 will use the support cartouche and not CD-ROM, this in order to avoid times of loading according to Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo.

At the end of 1994, Nintendo had revealed a processor Silicon Graphics 64 bits given rhythm with 105,5 MHz and able to manage 400.000 polygons per seconds, having to equip its console. A few months later, these specifications were changed and reduced for unknown reasons (undoubtedly with an aim of not having a too high introductory price).

The year 1995 is not made that of contradictory advertisements and delays on behalf of the firm of Kyoto. Indeed Ultra the 64 was, at its time, a so colossal project that Nintendo had to face many engineering problems what forced it to still push back its machine still and. Always in 1995, Nintendo and its new developer fetish Rareware (at the origin of Donkey Kong Country ) collaborate with Midway for the exit of a terminal of arcade using the architecture from Ultra the 64 in order to give to the players a first impression of the future machine. Two plays will leave on this support at the time of the year 1995: Killer Instinct and Cruis' N the USA .

Finally Ultra the 64 is presented at the time of Shoshinkai on November 24th 1995. The public is amazed: the first plays presented, Super Mario 64 , Wave Race 64 , Mario Kart 64 , a remix in 3D of Final Fantasy VI are époustouflants and the new lever provided with an analogical stick is revolutionist. To satisfy the critics who denounced the choice of the support cartouche at the era of the CD-ROM, Nintendo also presents an extension of the baptized console 64DD. This extension was to allow the reading of optical disks offering a storage capacity more important than the traditional cartridges.

February 1st, 1996, the console is once again famous. Nintendo projected to preserve name " Ultra 64" for the Western market. However, to avoid confusion with the label Ultra Ranges of Konami, the console was named Nintendo 64 everywhere in the world.

The console ends up leaving on June 23rd 1996 to the Japan with only 3 plays: Super Mario 64 , Pilotwings 64 and Saikyō Habu Shōgi , on September 19th, 1996 with the the United States at the price of 199 dollars and on March 1st 1997 in Europe (September 1st, 1997 for the France at the price of 990 frankly S, is 150 euros). This delay between American and European launching is explained by the fact why Nintendo off Europe had just reorganized and that the supply console was very badly carried out.

Beginning 1997 Square did not announce its will to forsake Nintendo and not to develop any more but on Playstation. Hard blow for Nintendo which sees thus private one of the most popular franknesses in Japan: Final Fantasy . Still at present the circumstances of this rupture remain mysterious. However, there is extremely to bet that this choice is due to the fact that Square, like much of other third editors, did not wish to develop on a console still using the support cartouche, too considered limited in terms of data storage and difficult to program.

Although profiting from excellent sales during its launchings Nintendo 64 will never meet discounted success: PlayStation having taken an advance too difficult to catch up with. Moreover the difficulty of programming and the support cartouche will make flee all the editors almost. Nintendo and Rare ware thus finds almost the only editors of the console and will benefit from it to leave the principal popular plays the console: Mario Kart 64 , Fox Star 64 , GoldenEye 007 , F-Zero X , Banjo-Kazooie , Perfect Dark …

In December 1998, Nintendo launches on the market the play more awaited its generation: The Legend off Zelda: Ocarina off Time which succeeds in being sold to 6 million specimens in 2 months! It is the play which will start again N64 whose sales started to be blown.

In December 1999, Nintendo finally leaves to Japan the 64DD, a peripheral which was to revolutionize the market, unfortunately because of its great delay (he was announced in 1995), it was a commercial failure. About the year 2000, the rate/rhythm of the exits starts to slow down in spite of some successes ( Perfect Dark , The Legend off Zelda: Majora' S Mask ). The last play left in Europe for the console was Mario Party 3 which leaves on November 16th 2001 and the very last developed play was Tony Hawk' S Pro Skater 3 which left only to the United States on August 20th, 2002. After this date the production stopped to make place with the GameCube.

Many people think that Nintendo 64 is the largest failure of Nintendo (with the Virtual Boy), however with more than 32 million sold units, and of the plays considered as models in their kind, Nintendo 64 was the occasion for Nintendo to make high profits.

In 2003, Nintendo brought out Nintendo 64 but for the Chinese market. The design as some technical specifications were changed and renamed IQue comforts it.

Currently (2007), of the plays Nintendo 64 can be downloaded for 10 euros on the Wii thanks to the service of virtual Console.

The lever

The principal innovation of Nintendo 64 compared to its competitors was without any doubt its lever. Imagined by Shigeru Miyamoto it is appeared as a three-pronged fork and it is possible to hold it in 3 different ways. It is the first lever with being provided with an analogical stick, making it possible to move easily in the plays in 3D. Thereafter all the manufacturers will copy the analogical stick and will integrate it into their levers. The lever Nintendo 64 has 2 buttons of action (has and B), 4 buttons auxiliary (C), 2 side buttons (L and R), a trigger located in lower part of the very practical lever for FPS (Z), an analogical stick, the traditional directional cross and the button start. The lever has a port of extension on which it is possible to connect a memory card or a kit vibration, which allows a more complete immersion in the play, while vibrating according to certain actions. This system was considerably developed dice the beginnings of the console then all along its career, in particular through both Zelda and the sets of shootings GoldenEye and Perfect Dark.

Technical specifications

  • Processor: Processor Reallity Engine based on technology RISC MIPS R4300i 64 bits (cut-rate version of R4000) given rhythm with 93,75 MHz. R4300i supports the instruction sets 32 and 64 bits of R4000, it has one pipeline (the ALUMINUM and the FPU divides it) but its effectiveness is close to an instruction by cycle. R4300i has 8 Kio of mask of data and 16 Kio of mask of instructions (8 Kio for R4000).

  • Memory: 4 Me Rambus DRAM (bytes coded on 9 bits, is 36 MIB in all, 9th is used with control as parity) given rhythm to 250 MHz. The memory is unified, it is thus used also of video memory and sound plug for example. The Pack Expansion makes it possible to add 4 Me, to have on the whole 8 Me (72 MIB with the parity), and thus to make it possible, if the play supports it, to play in more high-resolution with textures of better quality.
  • Band-width of the bus report real/effective: 536,4 Moi/s/476,8 Moi/s.
  • Coprocessor: CCP, given rhythm to 62,5 MHz. It is component the most important, all the data forward by the CCP (which is also used as controller report to the CPU). It integrates 2 microprocessors, the RSP and the RDP. The RSP for the sound and graphics (matric operations, geometrical transformations and lighting, rasterization of the polygons), it also manages to it back-face culling and culling volume. The RDP for returned list of posting created by the RSP. It has a unit of texture (fillrate theoretical of 62 MTexel/s), with filterings (trilinear and antialiasing) and management of the Z-buffer.
  • Resolutions: 256 × 224,640 × 480 interlaced.
  • Polygons/dry: 150  000.
  • Colors: 32 bits RGBA with system of smoothing. Video out: 21 bits.
  • Sound: stereophony in 16 bits.
  • Cartridges: from 4 Me to 64 Me (32 MIB to 512 MIB).

Graphic effects

Here a summary of the various realizable graphic effects by Nintendo 64.

Structure and development

Typically, in a play N64, the RSP fulfilled the functions of transformation, lighting, clipping, " triangle setup" as well as audio decoding. Nintendo 64 being one of the rare consoles deprived of an audio chip, these operations was carried out by the RSP or the principal processor. It was however of use which the audio is treated by the processor, in order to leave free the graphics chip. The workload on Nintendo 64 was in this extremely flexible point according to the wills of the programmer. If the system were very flexible, that implied on the other hand that the programmer can optimize the code in order to balance the use of the various components of the machine.

The RSP is completely programmable, by the means of the Microcode (µcode). While modifying microcodes it being carried out on the chip, one can carry out new operations, create new effects, be more adapted either at the speed, or with quality, among other possibilities. However, Nintendo was not very inclined to divide the tools for modification of microcodes with the developers, until the end-of-life of the console where they only started to cooperate with developers sorted on the shutter.

To program microcodes it RSP was considered difficult because the tools were very basic, without debugguor, and with a thin documentation. It was thus very easy to make errors difficult to detect thereafter, and which could cause random errors. Certain developers pointed out that microcodes it by defect, " Fast3D" , developed by Silicon Graphics, for the use in the plays (it was adapted little was too precise) and that the performance suffered from it consequently. However, of the developers like Factor 5, Boss Range Studios and Rare created programs microcodes specific, which allowed better results that microcodes it standard.

Actually, there existed two types of microcode developed by Silicon Graphics:

  • microcodes It Fast3D : 100.000 polygons a second
  • microcodes It Turbo3D : 500.000-600 000 polygons a second with a quality equivalent to the PlayStation.

Nintendo never authorized the use of this second code for the commercial plays.

Nintendo 64 had technical limitations which had with multiple causes among which one finds the limitation in technology 3D, had at the time.

In addition, one of the most noticed defects was the limitation of 4 Kio for the mask of textures. It was thus very difficult to charge with textures of big size in the machine with returned, more specifically of textures with a depth important color. It was the first cause of fuzzy textures which one often criticized. Another cause of this effect of blur was trilinear filtering as well as the limited capacity of the cartridges. Another important point was that if one used MIP mapping, the memory hiding place for textures decreased by half, to 2 Kio. In order to better represent us this idea, let us announce that a texture of 64*64 pixels color 4 bits weighs 2 Kio, which shows that the mask is quickly filled. The most creative developers, at the end of the lifetime of the console, used some astute techniques in order to simulate larger textures (texturization multi-layer for example). Conker' S Bad Fur Day is an example.

The subsystem of unified memory also represented a critical weakness of Nintendo 64. The memory RDRAM had an extremely important latency (640 NS in reading), which cancelled the advantage of a high band-width. In fact, a memory with high latency creates times in the speed of obtaining information in memory by the processors, like in the modification of the memory.

Cartridges against CD

N64 was the last console of living room to use ROMANIAN cartridges to store its plays. Nintendo defended its choice for the following reasons:

  • times of loading of the cartridges are almost non-existent;

  • the ROMANIAN cartridges are difficult to copy and thus to pirate;
  • it is possible to add internal chips to the cartridges (such as chips of safeguard or coprocessors).
  • the majority of the plays can be safeguarded on the cartridge and do not require a memory card.
  • question solidity, it is certain that the cartridge is much more resistant than simple CD.

On the other hand the choice of the support cartouche also brought with him its batch of disadvantages:

  • although the cartridge is more resistant than CD, it ages less although this last (oxidation of the circuits…)

  • the price of a cartridge is much higher than that which a CD-ROM, which explains the high price of the plays N64 (approximately 450F against 300F for a play 32 bits).
  • storage capacity is quite lower than that of a CD-ROM.
  • the difficulty in making hold of the scenes kinematics on a cartridge.

At that time, the rival systems, namely Playstation of Sony and Saturn of Sega, use Cédérom S to store the plays. These discs are much less expensive to manufacture and easier to distribute, from where a cost much less low for the editors. Consequently the developers of plays, which supported the Nintendo consoles traditionally, then develop plays for the competition because of the larger margin of profit on the platforms equipped with CD.

Moreover, the restricted storage space of the ROMANIANS limits as well the quantity of data, graphic as sound, of the plays, which often gives them a poor aspect. Certain plays ( Resident Evil 2 , Perfect Dark , Conker' S Bad Fur Day ,…) hold on ROMANIANS larger, but that results in a higher price. A cartridge had a size ranging between 32 and 512 MIB. There could be digitalized voices and vidéos in full screen, but of poor quality to the difference of the competitors.

The console which succeeded N64, the GameCube left in 2001, stores its plays on discs Mini DVD.

Accessories and extensions

  • 64DD : extension of the console, comparable with the Satellaview of the Super Nintendo or with the Mega CD of the MegaDrive. It connects in lower part of the console via the EXTension port. Its principal goal is to read the magnetic disks having a storage capacity more important than the traditional cartridges (at least of first generation) and weaker production costs. It was also possible, thanks to the integrated modem, to play in network (only one play exploits this capacity) and to consult its emails. The 64DD left only to the Japan and in small quantity. A mouse, facilitating the reading of the emails, and a disc of navigation Internet were provides with the 64DD.

  • Kit Vibration (Rumble Pack) : An object to be embedded under the lever and which makes it possible to make vibrate this one has certain passages of the play (only with the plays using this possibility).

  • Memory card (To control Pack) : The majority of the plays give the possibility of safeguarding directly on the cartridge but a certain number require a memory card.

  • Expansion Pack : An accessory to be inserted directly in the console. Created in the beginning to make turn the 64DD, it increases the memory of the console of 4 Me to 8 Me. It is essential to make function certain plays, that is to say completely (as for Donkey Kong 64 or The Legend off Zelda: Majora' S Mask ), is partially (the multijouor mode of Perfect Dark , for example). Other plays use it to improve their graphics.

  • Voice Recognition Links : Ever left to Europe, it is in fact a microphone usable with the plays Hey You, Pikachu! and Densha De Go!.

  • Bio Sensor : Left only in Japan and is compatible only with the play Tetris 64 (play left in the whole world under the name The new Tetris , but stripped of the mode of play using the Bio Sensor ). It is an accessory in 2 parts: part of the format of a memory card which is embedded under the lever and another part, in the shape of grip which clip with the lob of the ear. It makes it possible to transmit the Pouls to the play and to accelerate or slow down the fall of the blocks according to its speed.

  • Fishing cane : Exit only with the Japan and compatible that with very few plays, this fishing cane coupled to a lever is produced by Nintendo.

  • Wide Servant boy 64 : an adapter with the similar format cartouche (in the principle) with the Super Game Boy. It makes it possible to exploit plays Game Boy and Game Boy Color its television. It was not marketed for the general public, it was reserved for the developers and the press. A version able to read the plays Game Boy Advance named AGB Wide Boy was also developed.

Pirate accessories

The copiers, in spite of the support cartouche little practices to pirate, have to face the policy very active anti-copy of Nintendo, and thus were not a very great success. They were connected by the lower connector of the console, whose last version of the console ( Nintendo 64 Pikachu ) is deprived besides. The accessory makes it possible to copy, manage safeguards, code of cheatings ( to see Action Replay ), to program, etc

There of be 4:

  • CD64 , external peripheral which is connected under Nintendo 64. One transfers the plays on a PC via a parallel port. Left in 1998, equipped with 128 then 256 MIB of RAM, the product suffered from an unreliability. One can add a reader standard CD IDE to him on the frontage, and of the standard RAM EDO. A hexadecimal editor is incorporated, to modify the original program.

  • the Z64 , distributed to the United States by Harrison Electronics, considered more reliable than the precedent. There are 3 versions, of 128 and 256 MIB of DRAM, and a purified version. It is connected by the port cartouche, is equipped with a reader Zip and a posting LCD; The cartridges are integrated on the top of the accessory, which is in fact a PC 386. Its establishment blocks the ventilation of the console, which overheats and stops sometimes in the course of part. It is thus advised to use it in a fresh place.

  • the Doctor V64 is the first appeared copier. It is composed of a reader CD IDE 8x, of a parallel port for the PC, of a composite video connection RCA, of a processor Surround 3D and a memory RAM in option of 128 and 256 MIB. It reads the VCD, TDCI, Mpeg1 and of course CD audio.

  • the V64 Junior , a version reduced of the precedent, in fact a cartridge with 512 MIB of RAM, safeguarded by 6 piles AA which allow a 8 hour endurance.

Alternatives

Here a list of the alternatives of the console.

  • Carbon : the original console, of black color.

  • Green jungle: an special edition with a transparent green hull left in 1999 to accompany the exit by Donkey Kong 64. The lever it was of yellow and brown color.
  • Funtastic series: series left in 2000 and having a hull different color. Exist in blue, orange, red, purple and gray.
  • Gold: the rarest version of the console. Exit at the beginning only in the United States and in low number to off accompany the exit by The Legend Zelda: Ocarina off Time. Nintendo also left the Gold version to the Japan, in very low number, at the time of the launching of the 64DD.
  • Pikachu Nintendo 64: a version of the console left into 2001 blue and yellow and decorated color effigy Pikachu. To note that this version of the console is deprived of the port extension.
  • Clear blue : version left in 2001 and accompanied by play Super Mario 64. Present a transparent on the top and gray clear blue hull transparent on the lower part.

Outstanding plays

detailed Article: List of plays Nintendo 64 alphabetically

In spite of the fact that Nintendo 64 was much less better sold than Playstation or even Super Nintendo, the number of " seller" million; (sold plays has more than one million specimens) is impressive: 51 plays, is 3 of more than for the Super Nintendo which was however sold almost 2 times more than N64.

Nintendo 64 was forsaken by the third editors what explains why its number of plays is quite lower has that of Playstation. In addition the plays often left to the account drips and were often delayed to see even cancelled, it is that one called the syndrome Nintendo 64.

  • Here a selection of the best plays Nintendo 64 developed by Nintendo.

  • Selection of the best plays carried out by a developer other than Nintendo.

Anecdotes

  • Although Nintendo 64 is a console 64 bits, very few plays use really the full power of the machine. Indeed one can realize by using an emulator which the majority of the plays use, a data processing in 32 bits.

  • the advertizing campaign carried out with Christmas 1995 was of a rare insolence towards the concurrent consoles. Indeed one could read the following texts accompanied by a photograph of the console (at the time named Ultra 64): Petit Christmas dad when you go down from the sky forgets the 32 bits that I asked you for or Si in Christmas one of the gifts resembles one 32 bits do not laugh, it east can be yours and even If you want really pleurnicher in a few months, require one 32 bits with Christmas .

Random links:Arlington (Texas) | Modbus | Fan art | School uniform | Shell Canada Ltd.

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