Nintendo 64 Background

March 22nd, 2008 by Mitch

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The Nintendo 64 is Nintendo's third home video game console, and it's third home video game console for the international market. Named for its 64 bit processor, it was released on June 23, 1996 in Japan, September 29, 1996 in North America and Brazil, March 1, 1997 in Europe and Australia, and September 1, 1997 in France (the system also saw a release in South America, albeit an unofficial one).

It was released with two launch games (Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64 plus one in Japan. The N64's suggested retail price was US$199 at its launch.

Nintendo 64 is the culmination of work by Nintendo, Silicon Graphics, and MIPS Technologies. The SGI-based system design that ended up in the Nintendo 64 was originally offered to Tom Kalinske, then CEO of Sega of America by James H. Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics. SGI had recently bought out MIPS Technologies and the two companies had worked together to create a low-cost CPU/3D GPU combo that they thought would be ideal for the console market. A Sega of Japan hardware team was sent to evaluate the chip's capabilities and they found some faults which MIPS subsequently solved. However, Sega of Japan ultimately decided against SGI's design, apparently in part due to internal problems between Sega of Japan and Sega of America.

In the early stages of development the Nintendo 64 was referred to by the code name "Project Reality". This moniker came from the speculation within Nintendo that the console could produce CGI on par with then-current supercomputers. In 1994 the console was given the name Nintendo Ultra 64 in the West. The console design was shown for the first time in late Spring 1995. The first picture of the console ever shown featured the Nintendo Ultra 64 logo and showed a game cartridge, but no controller. The final console was identical to this, but with a different logo. When the system together with the controller was fully unveiled in a playable form to the public on November 24, 1995, the console was introduced as the Nintendo 64 in Japan, contrary to speculation of it being called Ultra Famicom, at the 7th Annual Shoshinkai Software Exhibition in Japan. Photos of the event were disseminated on the web by Game Zero magazine two days later. Official coverage by Nintendo followed a few weeks later via the Nintendo Power website and print magazine. In February 1996 Nintendo of America announced a delay of Nintendo Ultra 64 until September 1996 in North America. Simultaneously it announced that Nintendo had adopted a new global branding strategy, calling the console everywhere Nintendo 64. Subsequently the PAL introduction was furher delayed, finally being released in Europe on March 1, 1997.

During this stage of development two companies, Rareware (UK) and Midway (USA), created the arcade games Killer Instinct and Cruis'n USA which claimed to use the Ultra 64 hardware. In fact, the hardware had nothing to do with what was finally released; the arcade games used hard drives and TMS processors. Killer Instinct was the most advanced game of its time graphically, featuring pre-rendered movie backgrounds that were streamed off the hard drive and animated as the characters moved horizontally. Nintendo dropped "Ultra" from the name on February 1, 1996, just months before its Japanese debut, because the word "Ultra" was trademarked by another company, Konami, for its Ultra Games division. The console was finally released on June 23, 1996.

The CPU powering Nintendo 64 is a MIPS R4300i-based NEC VR4300. The CPU is clocked at 93.75 MHz and connects to the rest of the system through a 32-bit data bus. VR4300 is a RISC 5-stage scalar in-order execution processor with an integrated floating point unit. It is a 64-bit processor, in that it has 64-bit registers, a 64-bit instruction set, and 64-bit internal data paths. However, the cost-reduced NEC VR4300 CPU utilized in the console only has 32-bit buses whereas more powerful MIPS CPUs are equipped with 64-bit buses. Many games took advantage of the chip's 32-bit processing mode as the greater data precision available with 64-bit data types is not typically required by 3D games. Also 64-bit data uses twice as much RAM, cache, and bandwidth thereby reducing the overall system performance. This was later taken advantage of by emulators such as the UltraHLE and Project 64 that had to run on 32-bit Intel systems. These emulators performed most calculations at 32-bit precision, and trapped the few OS subroutines that actually made use of 64-bit instructions.

The CPU has an internal 24 KiB L1 cache but no L2 cache. It was built by NEC on a 0.35 µm process and consisted of 4.6 million transistors. The CPU is cooled passively by an aluminum heatspreader that makes contact with a steel heat sink above.

Nintendo 64's graphics and audio duties are performed by the 64-bit SGI co-processor, named the "Reality Co-Processor". The RCP is a 62.5 MHz chip split internally into two major components, the "Reality Drawing Processor" (RDP) and the "Reality Signal Processor" (RSP). Each area communicates with the other by way of a 128-bit internal data bus that provides 1.0 GB/s bandwidth. The RSP is a MIPS R4000-based 8-bit integer vector processor. It is programmable through microcode, allowing the chip's functions to be significantly altered if necessary, to allow for different types of work, precision, and workloads. The RSP performs transform, clipping and lighting calculations, triangle setup, and has a geometry throughput of approximately 100,000 full-featured polygons per second[citation needed].

The RSP, as said, also frequently performs audio functions (although the CPU can be tasked with this as well). It can playback virtually any type of audio (dependent on software codecs) including uncompressed PCM, MP3, MIDI, and tracker music. The RSP is capable of a maximum of 100 channels of PCM at a time, but this is with 100% system utilization for audio. It has a maximum sampling rate of 48 kHz with 16-bit audio. However, storage limitations caused by the cartridge format limited audio size (and thus quality).

The RDP is the machine's rasterizer and performs the bulk of actual image creation before output to the display. Nintendo 64 has a maximum color depth of 16.7 million colors (32,768 on-screen) and can display a resolution range of 256 x 224 to 640 x 480 pixels.

Graphically, results of the Nintendo cartridge system were mixed. The N64's graphics chip was capable of trilinear filtering, which allowed textures to look very smooth compared to the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation; neither could provide better than nearest neighbor interpolation, resulting in textures that were highly pixelated.

However, the limited storage size of ROM cartridges limited the amount of available textures, resulting in games which had blurry graphics because of the liberal use of stretched, low-resolution textures, which was compounded by the N64's 4096-byte limit on a single texture. Some games, such as Super Mario 64, use a large amount of Gouraud shading or very simple textures to produce a cartoon-like look. This fit the themes of many games, and allowed this style of imagery a sharp look while hiding the texturing limitations of the machine.

Later cartridges such as Resident Evil 2 featured more ROM space, which demonstrated that N64 was capable of detailed in-game graphics when the media permitted, though this came at an expense.