Following the enormous success of the NES and SNES, Nintendo
had now confirmed itself as one of the biggest players in the videogame market.
To further consolidate this position in 1993 he decided to start the
development of what would be the successor of the Super Nintendo, a console
that had enjoyed enormous success managing to sell about 50 million copies. On
August 23, 1993 James H. Clark, the then president of SGI (Silicon Graphics,
Inc.) at a press conference announced the partnership with Nintendo, stating
that Project Reality, the code name chosen for the new console, would have the
power of hundreds of PCs for just $ 250 .
Obviously such a booming statement had strong repercussions,
both in direct competitors and in the hearts of fans around the world who
craved the new Nintendo console. 1993 was an incredible year for SGI, in fact
so many of the best workstations that were used in the cinema industry used SGI
hardware, and hugely successful films like Terminator II and Jurassic Park had
shown the enormous possibilities of 3D graphics.
A winding road
With such a resounding premise, only a very small detail was
missing: to create a console capable of supporting these enormous expectations.
Nintendo wanted to go big and to succeed in this feat, they put together a
"Dream Team" made up of developers and engineers from various
companies, including SGI, Time Warner Interactive, Rare and many others. But
the task was by no means easy and between defections, development proceeded
very slowly. In May 1994 Nintendo made an important announcement: its new
console would be called Nintendo Ultra 64 and would continue to use the old
cartridge media instead of CDs, much cheaper and more capacious, this according
to them to reduce the costs of the console. about $ 100.
At the Los Angele Convention Center during the first E3 in
history in May 1995 , some prototypes of the console were shown that ran an
alpha version of Killer Instinct, however the focus of Nintendo was its Virtual
Boy, which would debut shortly thereafter. in Japan.
During that fair, the direct competitors of the fifth
generation of consoles were also presented: Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation
(In this article we analyze their hardware and history) . In November 1995
during its annual show Nintendo showed the prototypes of two other games: Zelda
64 (which would later become Ocarina of time) and Mario 64, the new pad with
the typical three-pronged design was also shown for the first time. and center
analog stick and a new name change was also announced. The new console would be
called Nintendo 64. After many postponements and after a long and troubled
gestation, the Nintendo 64 made its debut in Japan on June 23, 1996 and only
arrived on our shelves on March 1, 1997.
A complex hardware
The processor chosen for the Nintendo 64 was a 64-bit 350nm
NEC VR4300, derived directly from Silicon Graphics' MIPS R4300i, but capable of
operating in two 32- and 64-bit modes. The VR4300 used a 5-stage pipeline,
which allowed the CPU to queue up to 5 consecutive operations in order to
almost completely limit downtime. Like many other CPUs mounted on consoles of
the time, the N64 one could only perform operations in a given order, moreover
it used a 24-bit Direct Mapped cache (16kb for instructions and 8kb for data)
and communicated with the memory via a 32-bit bus. Despite the extraordinary
capabilities of the Nintendo 64 CPU, it is certainly the most powerful of its
generation, most developers preferred to use the 32-bit mode, more than enough
to generate 3D images, less expensive in terms of the very limited storage
space and significantly faster than the 64-bit mode.
The CPU did not have direct access to the system memory but
had to do so through the graphics unit which therefore also acted as a DMA
(Direct Memory Access) controller. Nintendo used a single processor for audio
and video and unlike its competitors, the Nintendo 64 was a much more complex
unit, this because it not only had to deal with the rasterization of the image
but also accelerated the calculation of the geometries by lightening the load
of the CPU. The Reality Coprocessor was a 64-bit and 62.5 MHz processor
designed by Silicon Graphics and inside it housed two distinct units that
communicated with each other via a 128-bit bus: the Reality Signal Processor
(RSP) and the Reality Display Processor (RDP ).
The RSP was responsible for providing the CPU with access to
RAM, managing the audio component and starting an initial processing of the
image through a vector unit, it also managed perspective, clipping (the
clipping of textures in order to use a single portion) and lighting. The signal
generated in this first phase then passed to the Reality Display Processor to
be further transformed. The RDP was in charge of rasterizing the vectors,
mapping the textures on the polygons and mixing the colors, so as to generate a
complete frame.
The frame was then sent to the video encoder so that it
could be reproduced on the screen at a theoretical maximum resolution of
640x480 at 24 bit (16.8 million colors), however very few developers used such
high resolutions, in this way they could free up resources for more geometries.
complex or effects.
The enormous complexity of this work pipeline, which
involved various steps between one component and another of the system and introduced
a certain delay at each step, created many headaches for the developers ,
forcing them to find technical tricks to obtain the desired results.
Nintendo 64 had 4.5 megabytes of RDRAM memory that was used
with UMA architecture (Uniform Memory Access: in this type of configuration the
components do not have their own memory to work on but they all share the same
RAM), 4MB were usable by the system while the remaining 0.5 was for the
exclusive use of the video card and was used to manage Z-buffer and antialiasing.
It was also possible to use an expansion pack sold
separately and installed in a specific slot on the console to increase the RAM
up to 8MB, this configuration was essential to launch some titles such as
Donkey Kong 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.
As per Nintendo tradition, the controller chosen for
Nintendo 64 also introduced interesting innovations including the presence of
an analog stick, essential for moving easily in 3D environments, and a trigger
on the back. On the pad there was also an input to use a whole series of
accessories, including memory cards, rumble packs and many others. Also from
the points of view of design Nintendo gave a strong personality to the
controller of its new console, in fact the N64 pad had a peculiar three-pointed
or M design, certainly very fascinating but with an ergonomics that is not
exactly functional. There were four controller inputs on the console.
One of the most harshly criticized aspects of the Nintendo
64 was certainly the choice of supports. The games were in fact stored on
cartridges with variable capacity that could range from a minimum of 4MB to a
maximum of 64MB, this choice, as previously mentioned justified by the desire
to contain the console's sales costs, created a whole series of problems that
have helped to alienate many developers from the Nintendo console. The
cartridges, in fact, had a much higher basic cost than cheap CD-Roms, a support
that had been established for years in the PC field and that was used by both
Sony and Sega in the consoles of that generation. This caused an increase in
the cost of the games,
A success between ups and
downs
In its six years of marketing, the Nintendo 64 has sold
32.93 million units, and in the face of some questionable technical choice, one
above all the choice of cartridges as a storage medium, has been able to give
us priceless pearls such as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Super Mario
64, Mario Kart 64, Super Smash Bros and many others, in short, as the players
of the time loved to say: quality and not quantity. Suffice it to say that
"only" 393 titles were released for N64, some of which were exclusive
to the Japanese market, a number significantly lower than the over 1100
available on Playstation, which has now established itself as its direct
competitor.
Due to the expensive royalties that Nintendo demanded to
publish on its console, the difficult development caused by particularly
complex hardware and the problem of media that entailed enormous creative
limitations and economic losses, many developers who have always been linked to
Nintendo platforms decided to switch to the competition. , going to polarize
sales.
Despite some problems Nintendo 64, thanks to the support of
fans, to a library that has hosted some of the titles still considered
milestones and the ability to innovate and revolutionize 3D gaming, still
deserves a special place in the Olympus of consoles.
