The Nintendo 64's 5 BIG Problems
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- Опубликовано: 23 авг 2023
- The Nintendo 64 had quite a few great games on it, however those games could've done MUCH more if the console was designed better.
In this video I tackle the main 5 issues that slowed down the console.
NOTE: I've removed some "choice words", about superman 64 in the first 10 seconds so that RUclips plays nice, which is why the audio sounds a little cut.
This video uses music by Sledge Music Room. They make Silent Hill - esque music tracks that are free to use.
Check them out here: / @sledgemusicroom 
Игры
Only a few and 64 games used SRAM. The rest used a non-battery powered EPROM chip.
EEPROM rather, EPROM needs UV light exposure for reprogramming.
More than a few I'd say. Didn't most Nintendo (first party) games use Sram?
Zygal Studios has a great video on this topic, focused exclusively on the difficulties with development related to the architecture of the system.
The choice of RDRAM wasn't just people making a decision for no reason. It was, on paper at least, seen as a cost effective way to achieve good memory bandwidth. Of course, the design choice definitely wasn't worth the trade-offs that came with it, especially the latency, and the issues with the unified memory architecture which made it even worse.
You failed to mention BY FAR the biggest problem with the controller, which was the durability of the analogue stick. They probably should have found a way to update it to improve that, even if it was just to make replacing the control stick components easier and cheaper.
Aside from that issue with the controller, the controller was great for its time, and your other complaints about it don't hold a lot of water, though the size and position of the C-buttons does at least have some merit to it. It was the best standard console controller ever made when it was first released. While the control stick had durability issues, you can replace the control stick for a relatively low cost, and the control stick is actually MORE precise than even MODERN control sticks when it's actually in good condition. Speed runners (for most games) STRONGLY prefer to use original controllers over any modern alternatives. The only modern alternative that is regarded more highly than the OEM controllers are ones which use some high quality metal replacement components to improve durability over the OEM control sticks (which allows the sticks to have a "like new" level of precision for a long period of time).
Cartridges might've seemed like a bad idea early on, but as time progressed it turned out to have been a good fit for the hardware, and one of the biggest reasons is DMA.
Streaming random access data in real-time on the CD based competitors was in 90% of cases unviable (Soul Reaver's world data streaming being a very rare exception). Couple that with the rather sparse amount of general purpose RAM they had (2MB), there was only so much code and non-sound/non-texture asset data that could be loaded at any one time. It's one of the reasons a PS1 port of Soul Calibur simply couldn't have happened without major compromises. Animation data alone takes up a good chunk of ROM space on the arcade version, and the vast majority of it is streamed, since the 4MB of system RAM (double that of the PS1) is almost entirely taken up by the game's code, animations with head-tracking, the currently loaded stage and fighters' geometry, normals and GPU command packets, and various pre-computed tables of data for faster performance (this even includes camera angles!).
The N64 on the other hand can DMA a decent amount of data per frame. Many games stream animation data from ROM for the player object or even all objects to save on RAM usage. Tilt the cartridge of even the earliest of titles like Mario 64 and Goldeneye to see what happens when this process is interrupted. Likewise, nearly the entire set of games uses libultra's sound library, which streams samples for music and sound effects. One doesn't have to worry about managing audio RAM usage since there really isn't any.
imagine getting an absolute BANGER of a gpu and still managing to make the most underpowered system of the the big 3 in the generation, cause you can't help but cheapen out and be a stubborn japanese when making decisions
only nintendo
Hello, does anyone know what the name of the racing game at 3:23-4:05
it's stunt racer 64.
@@Kurriochi thank you
Interesting, but don't think this works with the timelines. When did each of the mega cd and svp release? I seem to recall the svp being late in the mega drive's life
Cartridges weren’t a bad idea. I still remember waiting 5 mins for a loading screen on the PS1. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the games but that was annoying.
4kb textuur cache is good,the far more powerful dreamcast only had 1kb textuur cache.
The difference is with how the texture cache was used. Consoles like the PS1 could load textures larger than the cache piece by piece automatically, while on the N64, it was done manually, so programmers could load textures larger than the cache more easily, while on the N64, the best games tessellated the polygons to make the textures fit or just cut up a polygon that would have a 256x256 texture into several polygons that would each have a 32x32 texture.
right,it s not the size but how the cache is used so 64x64 4bit textures is the max on n64,but the problem is also rendering the textures on n64 .@@Kurriochi
Good video and as someone that still has an N64 from when it was new, it's hard to argue with this video, with the exception of the controller. Not going to say you need to be a 3 armed alien, but it wasn't THAT bad either.
The N64 was a blurry foggy mess so thank goodness for modern emulation!
The controller was designed like that because they didn't expect games would need to use both a stick and D-pad, from what I've seen.
Turns out some games needed the extra buttons (like Starcraft), which is when the controller is at its worst.
The D-pad also wasn't the best, but the analog stick was one of the best up to that point, even if it's bad nowadays.
@SilverSamurai12 I dont know if you had the proper age at the time of N64 release, but, that "blurry" the trilinear filter, was not advance but super advance for that time, and foggy???? dont make me laugh, how many n64 games had fog, and how many in ps1 or saturn, do the maths!
From any examples i can remember off the top of my head, the same game on PS1 often had more fog than on the N64. The trilinear filter was seen as advanced, but all it really did was make the textures look muddy. At the time it was considered a good idea, sure, but the textures still look muddy.
@@Kurriochi yes the final texture feeling sometimes could be better, but is not a problem of trilinear filter itself, is the combination of a low texture cache with the filter.
@@Kurriochi You can control both Shoulder pads and Analog stick at the same time. Just grip most of your Fingers on your left Hand on the left handle on the N64 controller. Extend your same Hand and Thumb to the Analog stick and when you want to use the Left shoulder pad. Use your Index Finger.
64DD likely made a few people reluctant to buy N64 off the bat just by being planned and talked about. Magazines wondered if we'd have to pay another $200 to play "Zelda 64". Definitely a good thing Nintendo cancelled it, even if the F-Zero X expansion was really cool.
Pentium 4 + RDRAM. It's really a Bad to Bad combo
All the reasons you gave are the right ones, but you are giving them as they were mistakes at that point. When the HW was designed, those were not mistakes, just choices. In 1996 a Pentium 150Mhz was 1000$ worth and GPUs were not common, for context.
the processor and GPU were extremely powerful for 1996 and a great choice. The problem is the memory.
No, they were bad choices.
Not balanced, making development hard, at the end more expensive for less usage.
@@musaran2the choice of cartridges was made to make piracy harder and more expensive
You can justify most of the bad choices one way or another but cartridges instead of CDs had easily foreseeable problems. There's no excuse, Nintendo was just being stubborn and irrational, probably bitter about the failures they had with Sony and Phillips and overly obsessed with anti-piracy.
What's the racing game at 0:20?
it's stunt racer 64
@@Kurriochi Thank you for the reply. :)
It probably didn't use ddr as it didn't exist at the time.
It was really the cartridges that held the N64 library back. The other issues paled in comparison and at least didn't keep it from being the most advanced console out.
And it wasn't really the lack of capacity. I mean that didn't help sure but it was really the costs and lead times. Not just that it made games more expensive but they had high upfront costs and big minimum order quantities with high costs per unit. So if a game didn't sell well the company could lose a ton of money, assuming they could even afford the investment to begin with. God help them if they had a fatal bug after production began.
So developers were risk averse and mainly focused on simple games that played to the console's strengths and reputation while ceding entire genres to the competitors. Meanwhile CDs were so cheap and quick and easy to make PS1 and Saturn could straight up give away demo discs with magazines which was huge risk mitigation.
neat vid
n64 resident evil 2 was the definitive version to play. Do your homework! It had everything on the cartridge. The only downer were the compressed video's. But imagewise it was superior to PS one
The Dreamcast version is the 'definitive' original version, it runs in the highest resolution and has no cuts to video or audio quality. If you count in the gamecube re-release of RE2, then that one is on par with the Dreamcast one.
@@Kurriochi gamecube version is a ps 1 port. Just look at the blocky textures
The Dreamcast one is a a lot more crisp than all of them.
The N64 version was a tour de force at this time. Like Switch impossible ports.
But RE2 was designed for PS1 in mind and was better on latest hardwares of course.
RE2 was impressive on PS1 too.
Following yo ass homie
Slightly faster loading times? I beg to differ. The original Playstation was notorious for its loading times. It was using something like a two speed CD-ROM player that even back then was ridiculous slow. I think except for very few games the loading time on N64 games were almost instantaneously. Still, the use of cartridges for a gaming console at the end of the nineties is just mindblowingly stupid.
The main issue is the fact you still had to load data from the cartridge into RAM, instead of just running the code off the cartridge like on the NES/SNES.
Games like Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Majoras Mask, etc would NOT have worked on those very slow 90s CDs, that's just the truth. The cartridge format was a neccesary evil. Can you imagine having to wait 30 seconds for each level in Mario 64 to load? l
Yeah the guy clearly didn't grow up in that era as that was the trade-off The first game to alleviate the load times Was soul Reaver
@@KurriochiLoading was probably very fast, since you rarely ever bump into actual loading screens in the middle of gameplay that is commonplace on many PS1 games.
the first issue was the carts i think was more aggregious. they fucked themselves over with third party support although sony paid off so many developers to come to playstation
The carts were definitely the main issue, however if the console was significantly more powerful than the competition (eg. if the ram wasn't terrible), the carts would've been an acceptable limitation to game companies and the N64 would've been an absolute powerhouse.
Final Fantasy VII changed everything besides it wasnt going to be possible on the n64
It was mainly because many third party companies were already fed up with Nintendo’s business policies from the NES to early N64 era. When Sony arrived, it was a breath of fresh air and they were given plenty of freedom to do whatever they wanted. Nintendo used to quite restrictive on what went on their platforms and this in turned angered plenty of third party companies. The idea of sticking with cartridges wasn’t what angered third party companies, but because of how restrictive and unfriendly Nintendo was to third parties prior to the GameCube era.
It's really odd to see people complain about the N64 controller as though it was thought of as crappy at the time and can only assume that complaints are lodged from people that weren't gaming during the 5th generation. When the N64 launched, the controller was thought of as pretty revolutionary. I won't deny that the analog stick on it hasn't aged well and that Sony made a better controller in the end. In fact, I remember more people and magazines complaining about the Dualshock at launch and how the sticks were too low on the controller.
This is quite normal for the industry. Think of Alien Resurrection on the PS1, the game was one of the first FPS titles to use the modern setup where one stick moves the character and the other one moves the camera, yet it was panned by critics at the time for that exact reason. But nowadays it feels much more adequate to play than most other console shooters of that era because of its control scheme.
take out the profanity before the first minute, and watch how high this video soars. its amazing, and deserves to be recommended to everyone
*The Controller.
3 - Hands to hold it??? Excuse me, games that supported D-pad did not usually support Analolog stick & vice versa.
Games also had option to reverse c-buttoms into D-pad, if you wanted to use analog stick via right hand.
When we put things on perspective, N64 offered far superior PlayControl on 3D games than anything that was available at the time - 96/97.
Sure, Playstation got Dual Shock later on, but was PSX actually powerfull enough for proper Analog Control? -No. Just play a game like Rayman 2 on N64 as well as PSX just to see how placebo, loose control PSX actually had.
PlayStation's entire game library has literally 1 or 2 games that offer very best N64 -like - quality PlayControl.
*Cartridges.
1000kb is one megabit, 8 megabits=1MB.
So even by your incorrect math, cartridge would stii be 40000kb Vs. 300kb sec, - That's still 133 times faster.
But on reality, amount of data that toke CD a few second to transfer, Cartridges handle on 0,001 sec.
This is a massive difference that makes cartridges wastly superior as interactive - media-format that is of course, gaming.
Few times Cartridge speed was slower than possible, due developers saving money by using zipped, compressed files to be able to still fit the game on sincle smaller cartridge rather than go for -via extra cost larger cartridges. But even then, it was always far faster than anything on CD.
I should notet that PC did not ever use CD's, nor DVD's, insted, it used hardrive pre-installation for each game. So you might think that CD-ROM was a good media for games, when it really wasn't.
Storage space on CD DOES NOT BENEFIT on PSX, as only 2MB was available per a level!
But cartridges streamed data all the time while playing as well, not just to remove loading screens, but to offer more interactive, free to go anywhere playing experience, where player had really ability to make the difference, when CD's linear gameplay was pretty much all it could do.
Only PSX games that ever streamed data, were Crash Bandicoot --games and Fifth Element. Apocalypsy?
I would not think anyone buying N64 that had additional $100 on price, just for slow CD driver, that never was ideal for type of games that Nintendo made/makes. -Just look at the GameCupe sales!
But yes, it was very expensive at the time to produce big cartridges, so it scared many publishers away. Also 64DD would had been best media of all, if it would had been day one release on console, as it was cheap to manufacture, fast, and had more space than any of the N64 Cartridge-games. However 64DD was NOT cancelled as you claim.
*RAM
You constantly compare N64 to newer consoles, but get this: Also PS3 have shared RAM as well, that was on total only the same as XBOX 360 sincle RAM.
But, you seem to forgot, that not only N64 had MORE RAM than other systems, it didn't even need to have more RAM, thanks to Cartridge. -Whole RAM could be swapped to new data in less than one second on fly.
CD-Systems had to fit entire level into system RAM, so everything you could do in game was decited even before you play!
*About Texture Cache.
Did you know, that N64 had TWICE the texture cache than PlayStation.
But unlike PSX, you could swap the textures (or even levels) any time, even during gameplay, -thanks to speed. So Cartridge system does not need a big texture cache anyway.
Besides, -just cut 64*64 pixels from any real life photo you have ever token on your smart phone.
-Is the end result above 4kb? -I don't think so!
Overall:
Only issues on N64 were that it was difficult & expensive to develop especially as 3DFX was new & hard at the time, and Playstation games were much easier to port to PC than 64
But to even compare next gen -system to the previous gen, is kind of talk, that that requires true fan to make claims.
Edit: Apocalypse PSone might also had streaming durind gameplay to reduce loading times.
One last thing about cartridges, it made piracy less viable, somewhat expensive and more difficult. Discs are extremely inexpensive and easy to copy with a disc burner
and because of the cartridges, only ~300 games came out for the system as opposed to even the Saturn's 1000 or the PS1's 8000+ games and those games cost way more.
Lots of PS1 games came down to 40, or even 20 USD per game, while the carts couldn't really drop below 60$.
@@Kurriochi -And because of the cartridges, every N64 console & N64 - game still works.
Im here just to watch the fanboys cry :D
Stopped watching after that stupid three hands controller comment and 'slightly' better loading times.
Yeah still outsold the Dreamcast and Saturn
Sales mean nothing.
@@crazedlunatic43sales are the life blood of the industry.your console sells you live to produce another console.your console doesn’t sale you end up like sega,Atari,etc…
Yeah, still has all the problems mentioned in the video.
Saturn outsold it in Japan, and the Dreamcast only had 18 months outside of Japan.
The DC was awesome. It had so many amazing and unique games. At the time it had the best sports games, best rpg of all time (Skies of Arcadia), the best ever fighting game (Soul Calibre) and many great unique games. (Space Channel 5, Chu Chu Rocket, Crazy Taxi, Power Stone, Samba De Amigo, Jet Set Radio, Shenmue, ect)
N64 fan boys aren’t very happy
I mean I'm not very happy either, it would've been a way more powerful console if they just didn't use RDRAM, even with no other issues fixed.
The N64 did fine excluding Nintendo systems, only system that came out before N64 to out do it was the Genesis and the PSone and people like to say the ps1 did 100mill vs n64 32mill but fail to bring up that the ps1 was also a Mp3 cd player, came out over a year before it, had way more 3rd party support and the Ps1 discontinued in 2006 giving it 11year life span vs N64 disc in 2002 which on had a 6 year life span so please stop it No game on a Ps1 is touching Mario 64 and Zelda OOT
Have you tried crash, spyro or jumping flash? They're pretty fun 3d platformers on the platform.
From action RPGs, there is an ocean of games to pick from too.
Metal Gear Solid
Silent Hill
Mega Man Legends 1&2
Parasite Eve 1&2
Legend of Dragoon
Crash Team Racing
Syphon Filter
No mercy. Wrestlemania 2000.
@@KurriochiI can tell you're a PlayStation fanboy already.
You’re silly. You listed everything that made the n64 unique at the time as bad. Remember in1996 the 64 helped pioneer 3d games so you can’t compare it to modern day standards. And your accent is annoying.
Stop complaining and just enjoy one of the most innovative and creative video game consoles ever made.
Everything I enjoy has flaws, I like the console, so why shouldn't I call out design flaws it has?
Because it makes me sad.@@Kurriochi
Hard pressed to call it "most innovative" 3D polygons were available on the MegaDrive before it, as were cartridges since the 70's on Atari consoles.
It didn't really innovate anything, whether you like the system or not. Unless you count accessibility for players with a third hand who wanted a competitive advantage.
Who is complaining?