History of the Nintendo 64: Was it a SUPER COMPUTER?!
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- Опубликовано: 23 июл 2024
- The Nintendo 64 has a fascinating history. It was a partnership with Silicon Graphics (SGI), a long-time leader in graphics visualisation and supercomputing. But how much of the initial promises were kept, and how close was the N64 to expensive SGI workstations?
My retro gaming podcast: theretrohour.com
My Twitter: / danwood_uk
My Facebook: / danwooduk
Sources in this video:
Rare: The Inside Story - The Retro Hour Ep180: theretrohour.com/history-of-r...
Nintendo Ultra 64 Pre-release Shark Demo (on Indigo2 Impact): • Performer Atlantis - N...
Demos for IRIX 5.3 All Indigo2 IMPACT ISO: archive.org/details/IRIX5.3Al...
Reality CoProcessor Information: dragonminded.com/n64dev/Reali...
Archive footage from Bad Influence/ITV, used under Fair Use.
Project Reality Ultra 64 Nintendo 64 N64 Commercial Promo: • Project Reality Ultra ...
The Very bad wii u ads: • The Very bad wii u ads
SONY: PlayStation (1995): • SONY: PlayStation (1995)
20th Anniversary of PlayStation | The Games: • 20th Anniversary of Pl...
N64 Japanese Promo Video/Rare Beta Footage (1995-96) Shoshinkai: • NEW N64 Japanese Promo...
#retrogaming #nintendo64 #nostalgia #90s #SGI 
Наука
There was nothing more satisfying to me than seeing 4 controllers plugged into the n64. All different colors, friends sitting in front of the TV.
U a real ninja
That's the solution to controller racism
My friends and I still do that to this day my friend, you should too.
We all play the original Smash Bros and shit gets insane competitive being in our adult years. Mix a few beers, proposition bets start flying, mid-game alliances form and break by the second.
I recommend breaking out the good ol 64 again and calling a few of your buddies. You will thank me....
007
That's really sad
This brings back memories that aren’t even mine.
That's such a Zen statement.
Mladen Novakovic haha so cool. You’re awesome
This brings back so many memories of the 90's.
Mladen Novakovic | Why tf you stealin memories you can't do that
Im the 2nd time keeper, upon writing this , FROM 64 --- > 228 ! Likes
I remember when I first time saw Super Mario 64 running I was blown away like never before and never since. It was truly amazing at the time.
Been playing that game again for the last month on my original Xbox. Still an excellent game.
Some of the game hacks of it are amazing, too. Tonight I played Super Mario Brother 64 and my head exploded. Somebody mapped out the levels of SMB so they would be playable as. 3 dimensional rendered 2D side scroller. Complete with firepower shooting!!
Other notable Mario 64 hacks include
*Portal Mario* (Mario can open portals which drop you into different parts of the game on the fly)
*Luigi's Mansion 64* (disappointed that it's basically just a remap of Mario 64; they did not change the intro to the game nor Mario's voices, but it's an awesome fun and difficult game) and
*Odyssey Mario* (can throw Mario's hat to take possession of any sprite in the game. Water balloons, goombas, boxes, chain chomp, etc.)
Same happened to me while demoing a Super Mario 64 kiosk in Fort Buchanan back in the day...
For sure but two years later the PC had half life and the N64 graphics simply couldnt compete anymore.
And I loved my N64 more than my PC (Zelda, Mario, Mario Kart, mystical Ninja - damn good times) but the graphics evolution in the 90s was frighteningly fast
one of the most iconic moments in video gaming history... not just for 3D gaming but mario in polys. it truly was a revolutionary game
and 64 as home console. also the hype of multiplayer with friends. so many great memories!
but i always wonder what the console would have been with its og ULTRA 64 version. there was some difference in the controller buttons
size and i think the hardware was originally more closer to arcade? before nintendo decided to downsize it.
I was in my teens when the N64 dropped, it was the standard party console. Some of the best times in my life were spent with friends sitting around this console.
Exactly it was so iconic it's legendary and always will be .....all games could die but the memories of Mario games would last forever
I remember at my local 'Toys R Us' here in Australia they had two n64s setup, one with 1080 snowboarding and one with Ocarina of time.
Sometimes you were lucky and got there when there wasn't a line so you could play.. I managed to get quite far once in OOT before I had to go home.
In 1998 and after I did enough chores I managed to save up my pocket money (I prob had like $10 but parents are awesome) and buy a second hand n64 for $50 from a rich kid who got one for his birthday.
I was 12 at the time.
Still have my n64.
My parents wouldnt buy me a system because they knew how addicted i would most likely have become with video games so my only chance to try these holy grails back then was going to the big retail stores and hoping there would be no line. You bet i milked the fuck out of my time playing in the electronics dept to the point where other kids would get all mad but i usually shut them up by showing them cool things i figured out how to do by either reading game guides or just trying anything i could with the precious little time i had to play. Sounds like a bummer but boy would i give anything to go back to those glory days.
Hell yeah Pierre!
@@1122markj nice! My stupid sister sold all my games at a garage sale once ages ago so I just had my console left. I ended up buying an everdrive and I'm slowly starting to get my collection back.
You can get a second-hand one in America today at my local game store for $64
@@whatever-wb4vu n64? Yeah in Australia it's around $100-130 for a standard one.
“Nintendo needed to have a decent range of games available when the console went on sale.”
Launched with just Mario 64 and Pilotwings.
N64 games are super expensive compared to the competition that's why it kinda failed to take over the market
I played the shit out of those games!
@@vie3147 I'd argue that it was them not implementing a better storage element like CDs, final fantasy 7 didn't come to the n64 due to storage limitations
@@vie3147 actually it wasn't that, that's not why it failed.
Yamauchi was too stubborn to switch to CDs at the time cause Nintendo owned cartridge manufacturer companies and Yamauchi was a businessman, he owned Nintendo till 2013, when he died but he never went through with the deal with Sony cause Sony would own all of Nintendos IPs but anyway he saw Sega CD fail, Phillips CDi fail and decided it wasn't worth it & went his way, which pissed developers off left and right cause developers needed more space for games, especially Horii the creator of Dragon Quest, he was working on DQ7 on N64 and it didn't have enough space, so he went to Sony and they offered him what he wanted and Yamauchi got flaming pissed and said in Japanese that RPG players are nothing more than basement dwellers.
Yamauchi was like that with everyone, he spoke his mind alot but also developers left cause Howard Lincoln was a bully and found loopholes through courts and blackmailed them to develop on N64 using Nintendos lawyers but back then Nintendo was controlled by all the original people who created Nintendo of America in the first place till 2000, when Iwata became president but Yamauchi was still the owner, so he had alot of say in Iwatas decisions.
Also developers were sick of Nintendos draconian ways.
I love Yamauchi to this day though.
Wiggy opened up the comments and read this at the exact same time he said that... weird
The SNES, N64, and Gamecube were powerhouses in their respective eras. It wasn't until the Wii that they dropped out of the graphics race.
N64 was overrated- a 3D platform only with limited texture memory far from the silicon graphics workstations they promised- and it certainly could not do the beautiful 2D hand drawn games found on the playstation or saturn with CD quality sound (rayman, castlevania symphony of the night, street fighter alpha 3, etc.)
@@K0ntakt5 As far as 3D graphics were concerned it was generally above the Saturn or PSX. Even if you think otherwise Nintendo still released a console that was in the general power envelope of the competition. It wasn't until the Wii that Nintendo dropped out of race for cutting edge console graphics.
@@03chrisv yes, it had more powerful processors capable of manipulating more polygons than the ps1 or saturn. you could see the difference in particular that the N64 could render larger 3D environments in the viewing area- however the tradeoff comes because of the decision to go with a cartridge format- which limits the texture memory and sound and music data the n64 could access. so while the n64 could render a larger on screen polygon environment with more triangles per 3D model, the environments and models had less texture detail than a ps1 or saturn game, which could stream more content from the CD media. storage memory was the limiting factor for the n64 because of the cartridge bottleneck. this also translates to 2D based games, which the saturn and ps1 were superior because again, 2D animation frames are memory intensive, where the n64 was limited- the stubborn decision by nintendo to stick with cartridges may have been motivated by economics to keep the unit price down, but ultimately hamstrung its own games. while n64 could boast about being a 64 bit system, the games didn't look or sound like games from the 64 bit generation because of the cartridge media. early demos done on silicon graphics workstations nintendo was showing off implied that n64 games would look just as good, since the n64 hardware was a consumer version of the same, but in reality the n64 games didn't look as good as the early pre-release ads for the system suggested. again, if only the N64 went with a CD media system, then they have a superior system for that generation, no question. but because they didn't, i believe that the ps1 and saturn were the better systems. n64 did not live up to its true potential, you had some good games, but less variety overall, with no hope of matching ps1 or saturn in the 2D game market, full motion animation and video, or music score
The NES was also a powerhouse in it’s day. Just look at it up against Sega’s SG-1000 that launched the same day as the NES (Famicom) in 1983 in Japan, and the difference in power was night and day.
@@ryanellison1044 comparisons between the nes and the sega master system almost always showed the SMS had better graphics capabilities and could reproduce arcade games better when running side by side comparisons with the NES (double dragon, rampage, and so on), but the NES had better sound chips and more sound channels. minus the stupid robot in the early days, the nes really prevailed in the amount of third party support and better exclusive nintendo licenses such as super mario, zelda and so on- other than alex kidd, sega never had any mascot power like the nes, and the nes had a much larger library of games and peripherals. sega master system was usually better with arcade conversions, nes had much more variety with proprietary nintendo intellectual property and third party support
Jesus I miss the 90s and everything gaming from that decade.
I feel you..
Same 90s were the best man
It felt so exciting didn't it?!
I miss the 1890s too.. such a fun time playing with my wooden action figurers.. Such lovely times.. Miss those 90s..
@@kenrickeason I miss 1490s gaming... the Mayans had some hella cool video games until Columbus and his goons came and smashed everything. jerks.
007 golden eye was my favorite game
That was everybody's
Playing Goldeneye with ppl on a split 1 was incredible
Hell ya
Great game!! Remember “perfect dark”? Good game as well..
@@Jason-vx4eo I still have 3 cops of perfect dark still in the original box unopened because they took them off the shelfs at stores
The system wasn’t ready so they didn’t release it yet
Damn I miss those days
Back when your dollar actually had great buying power lol
Nintendo still does stuff like that sometimes. Breath of the Wild was originally supposed to come out like 2 years earlier.
*Cough* Sega *Cough*
Still flopped lol
@John Ross no it didnt!
Unless you call 32million units sold a flop, compared to Sega Saturns 11million units sold
*Terminator 2 was made on an Alias Workstation, just like "The Abyss" was. I know this because I was involved with that very workstation.*
Why in bold?
@@bangerbangerbro cause I worked there 😤😉
@@bangerbangerbro *because he can who are you to question his text choices?*
@@stonedsavage7814 *INDEED*
Stoned Savage! Not a stoner moron lol
The N64 was still very impressive for 1996. The only consumer level tech that could compete with it at the time was 3DFX's Voodoo video card, and the only thing that could surpass it was Sega's new arcade board they were using for Virtua Fighter 3.
You mean the Sega Model 3?
And apparently the folks who founded 3Dfx and developed voodoo graphics were all ex SGI engineers!
@@marccusumano1138 SGI was a big deal back in the day. Their computers were the most-powerful out there without being big mainframes.
Absolutely. Would it be correct to say that for the console was actually more powerful than the standard PCs of the time?
@@idonteatcheetos It would have been more powerful than any other PC video card at the time until the 3DFX Voodoo came out in later months.
FWIW, those SGI boxes were workstations, not supercomputers. Very powerful, yes, but not of the same scale as a machine like a Cray.
Or indeed SGI's own supercompuers which were up there with Crays, though Cray specialised more in vector systems, while SGI was the king of scalable shared memory systems. They had, after the merger, intended to combine the two approaches, but management differences, etc. meant it never panned out. Remember SGI was the first to offer a desktop system that could match a Cray YMP (the R8000 Indigo2).
Dark Winter Wrong, check out the ONYX which was fully classed as a supercomputer. Not as fast as the most powerful Cray systems but that's not the benchmark for what a supercomputer is, as you can easily find out by reading industry literature of that era. And no, you don't get to redefine what is and isn't a supercomputer, your opinion on the matter is completely irrelevant.
The day I got my n64 for xmas was one of the best, thanks mom and dad. This was a great video with some even greater visuals. You guys across the pond had some awesome looking tv programming and "shedgeuling" back in the day!
I just bought a N64 last week and 2 classics games...
1: Perfect Dark
2: Mario Kart 64
👍
@@ultimatepu5h ok be right back🏃💨💨💨
Mario Kart 64 ♥️
Get Paper Mario!
You should get 007 golden eye
Heretwo Expose you should get american dad and speedrun it
I remember cutting grass all summer and saving up $200 to buy the 64 when it launched. Good days
Damn. I also did a lot of chores for some games
That must have been some shit grass.
The Amazing thing, launching for a low cost of $199.
Awesome video, and while not having an N64 of my own growing up, and having to go a friend's house to play it, it's for sure become one of my favorite retro consoles in my collection.
05:25 love that brief chat with the Rare team talking about the Silicon Graphics machines
You can hear the full thing on our podcast, chat starts about 26 mins in: theretrohour.com/history-of-rare-ep180/
Wow, brings back memories! I was there. Selling SGI to the graphics world. I helped Sega move from Apple to SGI for game development. Wavefront instead of Alias because it was polygonal instead of nurbs.
@Glenn Curry. The knowledge you have is priceless. I would like to here more about your experiences in a RUclips video.
@@nextlevelgamez9243 I was selling Symbolics computers before that. (Jurassic Park.) We were 85% of the computers on the ARPANet. symbolics.com was the first domain. MIT AI labs brain trust. But Gov funding went away and they closed. So I started selling SGI. Met a guy at Bally HQ that was with Sega wanting to move from the apple to SGI. There were about 4-5 3d graphics packages to conseider back then. 3 main ones. It was a battle.
Another fab video, Dan!
Must get my N64 fired up again. Haven't used it for about 12 years.
Great video and so much information. I still remember reading in one of the magazines of the time how it was going to be able to produce the same 3D quality as that seen in Jurassic Park. I couldn't wait to be able to play a Jurassic Park game that looked like the film. So you can imagine, I was a little disappointed with the final result.
I imagine the disappointment is your entire life, not just your failed expectation of a games console from the 90s
@@sirkastic I'm legitimately curious how your brain and emotions operate in tandem to produce this string of words as vulgar output, given the innocuous nature of input. it's a wonder bullies are so inane to think they can operate on a grand scale through the medium of text. testament to the pettiness that is their mindset.
True, but that's why I love all the technology we have today. The games and graphics for them that we dreamed about as children are accessible and available for us today, and it makes me happier than ever. I'm glad to see the industry evolve.
Today Nintendo probably would be sued for saying that Killer Instinct and Cruisin' Usa were running on Ultra64 hardware when in fact they are custom systems that had nothing to do with the real N64 hardware.
Except they never said that. Nobody ever said that. Go watch the KI intro on RUclips, it specifically states that it's "available for your home in 1995 only on Nintendo Ultra 64."
Nobody in their right mind would have assumed that an arcade game released in October 1994 was running on home console hardware that didn't release until late 1996.
@@rars0n In 1994 there were a lot of adds and articles for Killer Instinct and Cruisin' Usa, and they all said that the arcades were based in the Ultra64 architecture, and if you go to the wiki pages of both games, in the section "development", you'll see exactly the same.
@@shiva_MMIV The N64 branding was used to advertise the games coming to the home console. Nowhere in the games themselves was the branding indicating that the hardware was running in actual Ultra 64 hardware. The hardware was nowhere near finalized when those games were being programmed, so they had to create some kind of hardware spec in order to be able to make the games. Rare was the only one that had access to early N64 stuff, which is why their board used the R4600, while Midway's used a completely different CPU.
As for the ads you're talking about, none of the ads I've been able to find make ANY mention of "Ultra 64" at all. There's an article in the December 1994 issue of GamePro that mentions "the Ultra 64 coin-op system" in a preview of Killer Instinct, but there is no mention of hardware specs and they even openly question whether it has any relation to the upcoming Ultra 64 hardware given that Cruis'n was already known to be using unrelated hardware.
Ultimately, it still begs the question as to why anyone back then would have assumed either game was using Ultra 64 hardware, considering the hardware hadn't even been finalized yet. Even when arcade hardware has been based on console hardware, it's usually in some kind of modified form. And one could even argue that because the arcade games were branded so early on that the hardware spec could have changed significantly before it was released.
Whatever the case, by the time these games were out (late 1994) it was pretty obvious that they weren't running on anything similar to the console hardware we'd eventually get. I was personally more pissed off that 1. the N64 was NOT released in 1995 as advertised, and 2. we did NOT get an N64 release of the original KI as promised. Because those things were actually advertised every time the game went into attract mode.
what I like most about this video? That Philips monitor that I bought for the Amiga is what I also used for my N64. Zelda made me have a flashback of that.
I remember the launch of this beast and all the hype around the DD unit that never materialised. Quality video dude, very thorough and nice and technical.
Imagine if n64 had used cds from the get-go
Yeah insisting on using roms was a huge mistake, ps1 had games with no load times like soul reaver that just streamed from disc as you played couldn't do that on an n64
@@s727r But the N64 could load entire levels instantly in no time. Loas times where an advantage on cardridge. Too bad it had to little space for textures or videos.
Yeah it put a lot of developers off. See Final Fantasy VII
Like could have been Iomega letting Nintendo wisely use Jaz cartridge media.
The texture cache was 4 KB in size. Its small size led developers to stretch small textures over a comparatively larger space. The big strength was the N64 cartridge. We use the cartridge almost like normal RAM and are streaming all level data, textures, animations, music, sound and even program code while the game is running. With the final size of the levels and the amount of textures, the RAM of the N64 never would have been even remotely enough to fit any individual level. So the cartridge technology really saved the day.
- Factor 5, Bringing Indy to N64, IGN
I loved my 64. Zelda was the best game ever made
What are you doing on N64?! Go outside so beautiful!
Mine is Conkers bad fur day
Your profile pic is great, hah.
Agreed. All time greatest game ever.
Amazing video and format Dan!
Nice video. Brings back memories of buying my N64, which still sits underneath my TV today. I remember being super impressed with Turok. Also, I sometimes wonder what games on the N64 would have been like appearance-wise if the machine was exactly the same except it had a 128k texture cache.
I remember getting the n64 a day after it came out in Japan. I rode on the subway going home and people looked at the n64 box next to me and chatted with surprise (and some envy). I also bought mario and pilot wings. I was on top of the world!
@Apharmd Battler people did back in Asia.
I will never understand the 4k texture ram, what were they thinking, and the fact that almost every game forced the awful blurry bilinear filter, when games such as Quake on the system looked so much sharper and clearer without!
They were trying to smooth out the angular polygonal models with texture filtering and vertex shaders for achieving the cartoon-ish aesthetics needed in their own intellectual properties. In titles such as Star Fox 64, Mario 64, and Ocarina of Time it worked brilliantly because the graphics hardware catered perfectly to the typical look of games developed by Nintendo. Back then it was thought that company mascots are what sold consoles, and the growing importance of third-party titles was sorely underestimated. Had they gone a different route more suitable for games such as Quake then Mario would have appeared spikey and sharp instead of like the round, soft-bellied plumber everybody knew and loved.
@@djhenyo It had nothing to do with being optimized for Nintendo games. It had to do with the hardware architecture of the RCP and limitations of the chip size and the fabrication process. Take a look at the die shot of the RCP: there are three big uniform blocks, which are three 4 KiB blocks of SRAM. One is the texture cache for the RDP, the other two are the instruction cache and data cache for the RSP. Together, these three memory regions take up half the chip. Doubling the texture cache size would have raised the cost of the chip (it would have had to be larger), and expanding it to any more than double would have been totally infeasible.
The top Nintendo executives/designers, like Miyamoto, hated, really hated the jagged, jiggly aliased 3D at the time. They preferred no textures, if that meant smooth polygons. Texture mapping was not a priority.
I take my palpable lighting over sharp jagged edges every time on N64... (such as in Quake)
Now if there is something more compelling, that's even better .. but that RARE-ly happened...
@@djhenyo It's true, it does work well with Mario 64 etc but I wonder why more devs didn't experiment with sharper, unfiltered visuals. Maybe Nintendo were fairly persuasive about everyone using it idk
Checked your channel yesterday for a Amiga video and tought it is time he brings out a new video and BOOM there is a new video :)
Love the history lesson on this console (that i have in my collection with a everdrive)
That was interesting Dan - thanks. I was aware of some of the history but this was a great round up and answered a couple of questions I often wondered about (but never googled lol)
It wasn't $199 when it released in the US. That's what it became shortly after release.
Pre-orders were around $100 extra.
Yay Jet Force Gemini! Spent way too long testing that game!
@DR Evil I was on it at Nintendo in Redmond. I think 1h15m was my fastest run to get all the Tribals and complete the game, though I might be remembering Kirby64... both were REALLY fast to get through.
Fun fact: Super Mario 64's save selection screen is actually inspired by buttonfly demo on the SGI Indigo2 IMPACT demo disc. That's why the buttonfly demo looks similar
Great video sir!
Brought me back
Interesting video Dan, thanks.
Was ahead of PC gaming scene by three years until the Voodoo 3 graphics card. The potential of the consolé was seen on Jet force gemini, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Smash Bros, Paper Mario, Yoshi s story,Castlevania Legacy, Zelda cinematic effects, Turok 2, Conker, Factor 5 games and Banjo saga and of course KI arcades. I still thinking that the N Brand adjusted the final price of 250 dollars removing very important components
I remember laughing about the shitty graphics of the n64 back compared to what my PC was able to compute.
Besides where did you get the impression that pc gaming was not popular those days? These were the days my friend... have you been alive back then?
@@johannesgrimm2770 PC was popular in third world countries since 1998. Chile, South América. A few knew the best years of RPG and graphic adventure. I used a PC since 1997, then i was 11 year old. Maybe the same adaptation that you lived between 1989 and 1995, we experienced it later. My native language is spanish. I said only that the N Brand removed better components to adjust the final price. In PC at least Unreal was by far superior than the 240p N64 video output. Now i m Discovering the great treasures of that time, LucasArts weré huge then.
This was a really interesting and brilliantly produced video. Subscribed 🙂
Please do your podcast on RUclips Live or have it streamed there somehow! I'm too stupid to understand podcasts.
Lol, in any case, awesome vid. I'm glad youtube suggested this to me. You got a new subscriber. Thanks man.
Mate I kid you not, just today I was down in the bottom of my garden thinking " I'd love to see another Dan Wood video" lol.
Just watched the video. Fantastic mate. You never disappoint. N64 is easily my favorite Nintendo. Golden Eye forever :D
Are you a Poddington Pea?
@@RiC_David Blast from the past!
I always preferred the rougher, crisper look of Playstation and Saturn games. N64 seemed so much more powerful on paper, but in reality it wasn't. Perspective correct textures and polygons and fast load times were the only significant advantages of the system. Even N64 exclusive titles had that feel of being cut down and compressed, because of the system's restrictions.
Yeah even though on paper it was more powerful the graphics on ps1 and sega saturn looked way better
@@DripGxd_Cam It depends. Some first party N64 looked very good, but still suffered from cartridge space limitations and tiny vram. Another aspect was lack of RGB output. In America almost everybody still played on consoles using composite or s-video, but in Europe a lot of us used RGB through scart. N64 could not output RGB without heavy modding and that meant poor image quality compared to Playstation and Saturn. If designed better, N64 had the potential to be the most powerful console of its generation, but the way it was, it kind of bottlenecked its own strengths.
alan bane yeah, you’ve been duped by Nintendo’s marketing...Twat.
They both had their advantages, which we really see in the software. Nintendo could deliver more grand open kind of environments (Mario, Zelda) , the ps1 architecture was much better but only in smaller closed environments (see metal gear for example) that was pretty much the difference game wise!
@@XpRnz Ps1 could still deliver fairly open areas with some neat trickery, like it did in Spyro games, but yeah, most games focused on smaller areas. But my point here is less about praising the Playstation and more about N64 not delivering what it potentially could have.
Wow I’m glad I found this channel! Hope it grows. Keep it up!
Thanks Mike, that's the goal :)
Mario Kart64, Goldeneye, and Super Smash bros. Changed the game forever. 4 controllers, rumble packs, Goldeneye, Pizza and your closest buddies....Who would of thought? That was literally the best that life could ever get...
I remember the super computer called “Challenger” that Nintendo used.
The initial development platform before the N64 was finalized was an SGI Onyx. Game work later switched to the Indy because it was closer to the N64's final specifications.
3:55 Basically Mario 64 menu
Richard - Exactly what I was thinking!
Richard - 11:40 looks like the video editor actually pointed this out themselves later in the video!
So awesome
Nintendo ripped it off, and it wasn't even the only thing Nintendo tried to pass as its own about Mario 64.
In 1994, an Italian software company called Infobyte worked on a VR experience running on an Onyx (a high-end Silicon Graphics machine), where you started exploring the inside of the basilica in Assisi, looking at the paintings that are actually present there, and then you would end up in an imaginary medieval city in Hell that looks like Giotto's paintings. Guess how you passed from one environment to the other... by JUMPING INTO THE PAINTINGS!
I remember putting in the Mario64 cartridge on the release day. It was amazing. The graphics were so incredible and the game was so much fun. I think that must be the console I played the most. Mario64, Zelda, Golden Eye, WCW vs. NWO, No Mercy 64, Mario Kart...such fun times!
Biggest problem with the N64 was the memory subsystem. It was using the original 9-bit Rambus memory - this had a very high peak transfer rate for the time, but suffered a substantial speed penalty when changing between different pages in memory. Normally you would address this using caching, but since the chip was already very large and expensive it wasn't practical to add more on-chip memory (same reason the texture cache was so small). Since the N64 used unified memory, there was substantial access contention, since the same memory was holding the frame buffer / geometry data / textures / program code / working data / sound data and every time the CPU switched from doing one thing to another it had to swap pages on the RAM.
This is also the reason that the China market iQue Player had significantly less slowdown in games like WaveRace despite being built from the same Verilog source as the original RCP - it was using GDDR rather than Rambus, which has both a smaller non-sequential access penalty and the ability to keep two memory pages open at once, which greatly reduces the time spent waiting for RAM precharge.
Dan wood, back in the house! Yeh boy
4:05 ... Well... I do actually have one sitting in the attic... XD I just got one cause someone wanted to throw it away and i love old(er) PC's.
Lies!
Holzwurm _HD I don't think you know what a PC is nor what a SGI is if you think they share something.
Pics or it didn’t happen.
To be fair it doesn't run and is in a pretty bad shape but i do have (had one) I already sold it but i could ask the woman if she could send me some pictures.
Edit: Im no native English speaker so please excuse my broken English.
Nice one dan, very interesting.
Super cool video. Being a historical amateur tech geek, I really appreciate stuff like this.
Well.. The NES was the most powerful home console when it launched. The SNES might not have had the fastest CPU but was ahead in other areas, N64 and Gamecube were pretty advanced as well. They were mostly gimped by their storage format. The wii was the first console that did not attempt to compete on specs.
No, the Gameboy was the first. It was competing against the lynx at the time which was a wildly more powerful handheld unit.
The Gamecube was the most advanced console on the market and it was a relative failure, the lesson they took from that is that customers don't want or need the cutting edge, they want value. Keep the cost of the console down, keep the quality of the games high.
@@zoeherriot sure, but I wasn't counting portable systems.
@@mariokarter13 No the Xbox was more powerful than the Gamecube. Just an fyi.
@@mariokarter13 Most advanced console? Wouldn't that be Xbox at the time? It did have better load times compared to Xbox due to the mini discs tho.
If the title of a RUclips video ends with a question mark the answer is usually no
This title doesn't
@@YuliyValenko ya it does, it just has a ! Afterwards but the ? Is still there.
@@chaosstorm8307 ?!
I remember many long nights after school sat with friends playing 4 player goldeneye, probably the best game ever made for a lot of reasons. Great video
Probably my favorite game system of all time. I'll never forget walking down to blockbuster video as a 15 year old to play Mario 64. Then Zelda 64 came along and changed everything you thought you knew about videogames. Then it was GoldenEye. Great, great memories.
How did I miss the obvious homage to SGI Button Fly in Mario 64?
0:06 *Says "The Original NES"*
*Shows a super famicom*
The NES was on screen just before the SNES.
4:04 That shark tech demo was a demo of the Trilinear Mipmapping Interpolation algorithm Silicon Graphics used. Computationally a feat at the time.
Look into bilinear/trilinear filtering, it is a modern equivalent that GPUs do. The N64 made due with only 4kB, bilinear filter, of Texture Lookup Cache and reduces to 2kB free when the mipmap/trilinear stuff is being used.
I've done work with bicubic interpolation; it can make inferences beyond 4 points in a square, with 12 outer points that determine what came between the 4 points, and another square of 4.
Im glad I found your channel. Nice content.
0:48 what is that in the memory expansion slot?
An aftermarket expansion. They were usually about $5 cheaper than the Nintendo brand
.... if only Sega partnered with Silicongraphics..... they may have survived the console battle...
To be all true Sega was never good at taking great decisions and it lead to their doom in the console war. But it was many things that took em down. But I still have my Master system II. Think I gonna play some on it right now lol
@@Pulverrostmannen I'm playing soul caliber right now on my batocera emulati..... oh... i probably killed sega too.. lolz
pogito ha ha well it seems my old console still works and I been playing some Cool Spot now, man that game is hard when you have not played it in like 20 years ha ha
@svin True as you say and I was mostly referring to the console market since their decisions lead to their "doom", but they kept making software for distribution around various platforms instead. but I still wonder sometimes what they would be today if they actually has said yes to Sony for example. The answer will be unknown
Tom Kalinske & Sega Japan fight was what Sega their downfall in the long term; chemistry is everything.
Thanks for mentioning your podcast, just subscribed.
I was there and loved all the old systems!
Two games made the N64 awesome & they were, goldeneye & blast corps!
Mario 64 and ocarina of Time?
>"original NES"
>shows an SNES
I got my Nintendo 64 back In 1997 come out not long after the PS1... I loved Zelda.. Had long late nights was knackered going to work.. Good times when my kids were younger... I do miss the 90s... People say life is dead now... I some times wonder....
Nice job on this video!
back then when hardware was wonderful and innovative... sniff
It still is, it's just alot more complicated it's not much use to show off with, though everybody is drooling at specs lists every time a new console comes out.
@@XpRnz well PS4 and XOne are AMD PCs and Switch is a Nvidia Tegra!! Not much creativity or innovation there, they are off the shelf hw in a pretty box. Now, compare that to the custom designs of the Saturn, the Jaguar or the N64... hardware was much more fun, more diverse, during the 80s and 90s because it made a difference. Now everybody plays safe because hw is a commodity and nobody gives a shit about it.
@@net_news Don't forget portability being a primary consideration and a reduction in development time when working with terrible hardware. Sega Saturn, ps3, etc.
@@_nom_ "terrible hardware" from an economic point of view, yes... but from a hardware point of view Saturn and PS3 were amazing and super innovative systems. Games designed specifically for them were way ahead of the competency in terms of graphics and performance (Burning Rangers on the Saturn or The Last of Us for the PS3 for example)
Hardware is only as good as the software that runs on it.
And although consoles like the Saturn, PS3 and dare I say it the Jaguar and 32X were indeed powerful on paper, developers didnt like them, they were hard to program for so they "played it safe"
Hardware manufacturers know that its games that sell the consoles, and the only way to get games is to make it easy to develop for, and they know a lot if not all developers are familiar with the x86/x64 architecture and it is this reason why they are "playing it safe"
Now though it depends on if the game engines used support the hardware (Unity, Unreal ect)
So again making sure these engines run well by using compatible hardware is just the way forward.
Sure all they are now are custom PCs with a custom OS. But it is working, and thats all that matters.
We have gone back to the spec war because there isnt anything else to fight with.
Even in 2019 the N64 has very impressive performance 🤗
Great video man. You have a new subscriber.
amazing video mate ,,,plz continue cheers
Well done! The N64 is an amazing system. I have mine hooked up to my TV right now via the Super 64 HDMI adapter. Keep up the great work. Subscribed!
And now I have the N64 living in a tiny space on my mobile phone
Maybe in 25 years we'll have AR/VR contact lenses with Google Earth AR/VR so we can spend time with people from the other side of the world next to us or transport ourselves to there digitally. Probably
vrchat
We have it now
This was fun! Thanks mate. 🥳
Hi Dan, good to see you back in action on your channel. Great vid!Met you at the Amiga thing in Ireland. Talked about your great Atari ST vid and Domark. I have just started my own humble channel, please let me know what you think it's Zpep Gamer .
Keep up the good work👍
Ah yes, great to meet you then. Are you coming again in Jan?
@@danwood_uk Yes I hope to, to be honest I only live 20 minutes away so all been well I should be there.
what is that in the n64 expansion slot?
Rob Foster Ram, 4 megabytes of Rambus RDRAM, expandable to 8 MB with the Expansion Pak which was included for free with DK64
@@Thanatos4655 I know what an expansion pack is. I have never seen this particular variant before. For anyone interested its a "Pelican Expansion Pack"
History repeated itself in 2006 with Sony and it’s PS3 “cell” processor
@ItsSpeltGoogol Indeed, both developed by IBM and using the PowerPC arch
Only the Androids wouldn't be released until the late 2000's so he never became 'perfect'
Aside from being as loud as a jet engine. The PS3 to me, is still the greatest console ever made! Joined by the greatest handheld of all time! A hacked Vita 1000!
@@Michael45007 I think that's a feature for Macs so it's plausible
History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes.
i love how the Tech Demo's (like the shot at 11:47) were directly translated into SuperMario64's File Select screen...i was too young to be into Computers when i first got my N64, but looking back on it now, i can see why they could call it a Supercomputer...or perhaps an Ultra-computer?
hey man, great vid! what monitor are you running your 64 on? Do you use a VGA converter?
“Conkers bad fur day” “Mario Carr” “golden eye” “perfect dark”....👍🏻🎮🕹📀📺
So, if Sega had played their cards right, instead of the Saturn, we could have had the Sega Playstation 64?
They might still be making consoles now if that happened.
Hindsight, man.
El-ahrairah it was superior to all 5th gen consoles in certain departments. Virtua Fighter 2 runs at the highest resolution of any 5th gen console and actually higher than 90% of ps2 games, all at 60fps. 704x480 ntsc and 704x512 Europe. That was the 1994 equivalent of 4k60fps gaming now.
Oakley's the office I worked in was actually a purchasing office but it had a separate group from Ford in there they had like eight indigo's for 3D modeling
it's funny looking back on this and how far things have come.
The biggest problem is they stuck with cartridges, held them back a lot
Yeah very true but with proper care those cartridges will long Outlast any disc based media from the time
Nah, what they needed was a CD supplement for cut scenes and extra textures ect... just like today solid state is faster, by far, than optical media. So, load times on the 64 were almost nonexistent. That was their reasoning. Unfortunately they didn't understand just how popular cutscene was at the time. Sony had those so Sony won. And PC of course. A little load time was and still is okay with gamers but they thought no load times and faster hardware would win.
Though, your point is completely correct if assuming they had to choose between the two. Of course it would've been more expensive had they did what I think they should've.
@@CynHicks it wasn't just about cutscene. it was about audio quality tracks, more storage and hence more data to be put on etc
Cyn Hicks Sony won that generation because they signed development deals early on with Capcom, Squaresoft, Konami, and others for games like Resident Evil, Final Fantasy VII, and Metal Gear Solid. Sony saw how Panasonic and Philips failed miserably with their 3D0 and CD-i systems due to lack of quality titles and decided to come out hard. Another major factor was the cheaper CD-ROM format which game publishers could produce for roughly $1 total for each unit compared to approximately $30 or more for the Nintendo 64 Game Pak. Over the entire lifetime of the Nintendo 64 there were about as many games released as the short lived Sega Dreamcast. That tells you something. Also Sega fumbled all over the place with a surprise launch in the west, no (real) 3D Sonic titles, and other problems. The Sony brand name alone helped sell the PlayStation and made gaming cool for the masses. I owned both the PlayStation and Nintendo 64. The PlayStation got much more use due to more titles being released. Nintendo 64 did have some of the greatest Nintendo titles ever though with Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Wave Race 64, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Star Fox 64 and more. Good times in the 1990s!!!
@@CynHicks You mean.... Like a Disk Drive for the N64.... It's not a CD but far cheaper to manufacturer than a cartridge and can hold much more space especially not being burdened by "boilerplate" code which was already built into the Disk Drive system like fonts and such.... One of the entire points to the N64 was the disk drive and eliminating cartridges or using disks as supplementary content. The disk drive was a major selling point to push development of the console to production and a major selling point to licensed developers who already began making games for the disk drive for initial launch.
We never saw a disk drive because Nintendo really screwed up everything in that department and as a result certain games never got released, others had to be rewritten for a cartridge causing various bugs to be present, and when it finally did get released years later it was only released for a short time to demo an online service which failed and 4 games released at the time flopped because all the good games got re-written for cartridges years back. They royally screwed up the N64DD release that was suppose to be a very integral part of the N64 system and was promised to developers.
At least that's how I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong.
Great video which brought back lots of memories. I remember all the hype for this machine. I think it was the first console I really anticipated and was excited about. It was also the first and only console I bought an early import version of. I bought a Japanese N64 in July 1996 for about £600. It came with Mario 64 and it totally blew me away. I definitely got my money's worth. That summer is burned into my brain, sat in my room with drawn curtains, the sun peeping through the gaps while I explored Mario's world! Such nostalgia. I definitely think the machine was over hyped though. I bought Wave Race for 90 quid shortly after and played that sucker to death too. After that I remember going months with nothing I wanted to play and selling it. In the long run the console was a disappointment for me but that summer playing Mario and Wave Race is a legendary time in my history....
Great vid! It was my first console ever and it was my best until today! Hell yeah just the controller are wearing down :/ - but considering 1995 it is awesome how the 3D gets into the living room and with 4 Player Mode Mario Party you also can have entertainement literally for the whole family :D
Ah men! This video made me flashback about my excitement when unboxing my Sega Saturn... i even remembered the smell! My heart pumping when the logo kicks in! The square shoulders and pointy boobs of characters in Virtua Fighter! Good old days... i guess kids nowadays will never feel that regarding videogames.
I like to play this consolle whit the rgb mod ..007, Zelda, Starfox, F-zero, Mario kart ..
The tagline that Nintendo ran on print ads was simply "The fastest, most powerful game console on earth".
I remember reading all those rumors about the Ultra 64, im having flash back overload right now with this one.
great video dan!
I’ve never heard of this “Say Ger”. But I have heard of Sega. xD
KJ Milligan 😂
That's just how we've always said it in the UK, however wrong it may be. Hard to break that habit when you've been saying it like that for like 30 years.
Xei I meant no offense if any was taken. I meant it as a joke.
It's actually seeeeeeeeey gaaaaaaaaaaar 😉
@@xeigen2 Kinda odd that us yanks speak proper English, yet y'all invented the language lol
I always said the Nintendo 64 was when Nintendo betrayed me 😆. If you followed Nintendo Power back in the day, what the Nintendo 64 became was *nothing* like they were hyping for months as you showed here in your video. Of course Mario 64 was amazing, but I was always disappointed we didn’t get the arcade version of Killer Instinct they literally promised us. The announcement for this is in the friggin attract mode of the arcade version. And that’s not even getting into all of the Silicon Graphics hype we were being told about the Ultra 64. I don’t know what Nintendo was thinking.
Yeah. I grew up with NP as well. They made you think their “Ultra 64” was going to be a beast machine that made games that looked like the Toy Story movie and was going to make those 32-bit systems look like toys. That… did not happen lol.
Great video! 👏
I plan on buying a n64 sometime this year. Not because i want to play it, but because i find the design so beautiful, i just want to have it in my room.
Hang on a moment... that's not an Amiga ;-)
Come on, own up. Who else had a massive crush on Violet Berlin?
I think we all did!
who didn't🤣
Her lisp drove me nuts tho.
I used to work on an SGI workstation. We used them for molecular modelling. I still have my N64.