The Nintendo 64, often abbreviated as N64, is Nintendo's third home video game console for the international market. Named for its 64-bit CPU, it was released in June 1996 in Japan, September 1996 in North America, March 1997 in Europe and Australia, September 1997 in France and December 1997 in Brazil. It is Nintendo's last home console to use Game Paks to store games (Nintendo switched to a MiniDVD-based format for the Nintendo GameCube, then to standard DVD-sized discs for the Wii); handhelds in the Game Boy line, however, continued to use Game Paks. It was discontinued in 2001 in Japan, North America and PAL regions by the launch of the GameCube.

The N64 was released with two launch games, Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64, and a third in Japan, Saiky? Habu Sh?gi. The N64's suggested retail price was US$199 at its launch and it was later marketed with the slogan "Get N, or get Out!". The N64 sold 32.93 million units worldwide. The console was released in at least eight variants with different colors and sizes. An assortment of limited edition controllers were sold or used as contest prizes during the N64's lifespan.

Of the consoles in the fifth generation, the Nintendo 64 was the last contender and the most technologically advanced. However, the console's storage medium had limitations which harmed the market competitiveness. A significant limitation was the small capacity and high production expense of cartridge-based media instead of the Compact Disc format used by competitors. The limited capacity forced game designers to struggle with fitting game content into a constrained space, though the faster access time of the cartridge medium offered other advantages over Compact Disc media. Another technical drawback was a limited texture cache, which could only hold textures of small dimensions and reduced color depth, which had to be stretched to cover larger in-game surfaces.

In 2009, the N64 was named the 9th greatest video game console by IGN, out of a field of 25.

History

The Nintendo 64 owes its existence to Silicon Graphics (SGI) and MIPS Technologies, who were responsible for the R4300i microprocessor and the 3D graphics hardware used in the N64. SGI had recently acquired MIPS Computer Systems, and the two worked together to create a low-cost real-time 3D graphics system. The SGI project was originally offered to Thomas Kalinske, then CEO of Sega of America, by James H. Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics. Sega of Japan's evaluation of the early prototype uncovered several unresolved hardware-issues and deficiencies. They were subsequently resolved; but not before Sega had already decided against SGI's design. In August of 1993, Nintendo expressed interest in SGI's work, and "Project Reality" was born. An official announcement regarding their collaboration was made in October 1993.

Nintendo's code name for the N64, "Project Reality", stemmed from the bold belief that the hardware's advanced CGI capabilities would rival supercomputers of the era. The console's design was revealed to the public for the first time in late Spring 1994. Pictures of the console showed the Nintendo Ultra 64 logo, a ROM cartridge, but no controller. The final N64 console would retain the shape pictured by the Ultra 64.

During this timeframe, Rareware (UK) and Midway (USA) released two arcade titles, Killer Instinct and Cruis'n USA, which claimed to use the Ultra 64 hardware. Although Killer Instinct did use the same CPU as the N64, a MIPS R4300i, neither title were powered by Ultra 64 hardware. Killer Instinct featured pre-rendered character artwork, and CG movie backgrounds that were streamed off the hard drive and animated as the characters moved horizontally.

The completed N64 was fully unveiled in a playable form to the public on November 24, 1995, at the 7th Annual Shoshinkai Software Exhibition in Japan. Nintendo's next-generation console was introduced as the "Nintendo 64", contrary to speculation that it would be called "Ultra Famicom". Photos of the event were disseminated on the web by Game Zero magazine two days later. Official coverage by Nintendo followed later via the Nintendo Power website and print magazine.

The console was finally released in Japan on June 23, 1996. By this time Nintendo had adopted a new global branding strategy, assigning the console the same name for all markets: Nintendo 64

The North American version of the Nintendo 64 officially launched on September 29, 1996 with 500,000 units sold in the first four months. The PAL introduction was released in Europe on March 1, 1997. Benimaru It?, a developer for EarthBound 64 and friend of Shigeru Miyamoto, speculated in 1997 that the N64's lower popularity in Japan was due to the lack of role-playing video games. As of December 31, 2009, the N64 had sold 5.54 million units in Japan, 20.63 million in the Americas, and 6.75 million in other regions, for a total of 32.93 million units.

The system was frequently marketed as the world's first 64-bit gaming system. Atari had claimed to have made the first 64-bit game console with their Atari Jaguar; but the Jaguar only used a 64-bit architecture in conjunction with two 32-bit RISC processors and a 16/32-bit Motorola 68000.

Because of the cost of Nintendo 64 cartridges, and limited third-party support, the Nintendo 64 caused Nintendo to lose its leading position in its market share.

Hardware

The standard Nintendo 64 controller has one analog stick, two shoulder buttons, one digital cross pad, six face buttons, a "Start" button and a digital trigger (Z).

Central processing unit

The Nintendo 64's central processing unit (CPU) is the NEC VR4300, a cost-reduced derivative of the 64-bit MIPS Technologies R4300i. Built by NEC on a 0.35 ?m process, the VR4300 is a RISC 5-stage scalar in-order execution processor, with integrated floating point unit, internal 24 KB direct-mapped L1 cache (16KB for instructions, 8KB for data.) The 4.6 million transistors CPU is cooled passively by an aluminum heatspreader that makes contact with a steel heat sink above.

Clocked at 93.75 MHz, the N64's VR4300 was the most powerful of the competing consoles of its generation. Except for its narrower 32-bit system bus, the VR4300 retained the computational abilities of the more powerful 64-bit MIPS R4300i, though software rarely took advantage of 64-bit data precision operations. N64 game-titles generally used faster (and more compact) 32-bit data-operations, as these were sufficient to generate 3D-scene data for the console's RSP (Reality Signal Processor; see below) unit. Though powerful, the CPU was hindered by a 250MB/s bus to the system memory; not only that, but in order to access the RAM, the CPU had to go through the RCP (Reality Co-Processor), and could not use DMA to do so (The RCP could). This problem is further compounded by the RDRAM's very high access latency.

Emulators such as UltraHLE and Project64 benefit from the scarcity of 64-bit operations in the game's executable-code, as the emulator is generally hosted on a 32-bit machine architecture. These emulators performed most calculations at 32-bit precision, and trapped the few OS subroutines that actually made use of 64-bit instructions.

Reality Co-Processor

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.[9] The RSP performs transform, clipping and lighting calculations, triangle setup. The "Reality Display Processor" is primarily the Nintendo 64's Pixel Rasterizer, and also handles the console's Z-Buffer Compute.

The RSP was programmable through microcode (?code). By altering the microcode run on the device, it could perform different operations, create new effects, and be better tuned for speed or quality; however, Nintendo was unwilling to share the microcode tools with developers until the end of the Nintendo 64's life-cycle. Programming RSP microcode was said to be quite difficult because the Nintendo 64 ?code tools were very basic, with no debugger and poor documentation. As a result, it was very easy to make mistakes that would be hard to track down, mistakes that could cause seemingly random bugs or glitches. Some developers noted that the default SGI microcode ("Fast3D") was poorly profiled for use in games (it was too accurate), and performance suffered as a result. Several companies, such as Factor 5, Boss Game Studios and Rare, were able to write custom microcode that ran their software better than SGI's standard microcode.

Two of the SGI microcodes

• Fast3D microcode: < ~100,000 high accuracy polygons per second.
• Turbo3D microcode: 500,000?600,000 normal accuracy polygons per second. However, due to the graphical degradation, Nintendo discouraged its use.

The RSP also frequently performs audio functions (although the CPU can be tasked with this as well). It can play back most types 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. The Nintendo 64 has a maximum color depth of 16.8 million colors (32,768 on-screen) and can display resolutions of 256 ? 224, 320 ? 240 and 640 ? 480 pixels. The RCP also provides the CPU's access to main system memory via a 250 MB/s bus. Unfortunately, this link does not allow direct memory access for the CPU. The RCP, like the CPU, is passively cooled by an aluminum heatspreader that makes contact with a steel heat sink above.

Memory

The final major component in the system is the memory, also known as RAM. The Nintendo 64 was one of the first modern consoles to implement a unified memory subsystem, instead of having separate banks of memory for CPU, audio, and video, for example. The memory itself consists of 4 megabyte of RAMBUS RDRAM (expandable to 8 MB with the Expansion Pak) with a 9-bit data bus at 500 MHz providing the system with 562.5 MB/s peak bandwidth. RAMBUS was quite new at the time and offered Nintendo a way to provide a large amount of bandwidth for a relatively low cost. The narrow bus makes board design easier and cheaper than the higher width data buses required for high bandwidth out of slower-clocked RAM types (such as VRAM or EDO DRAM); however, RDRAM, at the time, came with a very high access latency, and this caused grief for the game developers because of limited hardware performance.

Video

The system provides both composite video and S-Video through the "MULTI OUT" connector on the rear of the system; however, the Nintendo 64 removed certain pin connections for providing RGB video, despite the DAC chip used in early models having the capability built-in. In most countries the system came bundled with a composite cable (AKA Stereo AV cable) The composite and S-Video cables are the same as those used with the earlier SNES and later GameCube systems.

Available to buy separately was a RF modulator and switch set (for connection to older TVs) and an official S-Video cable, although the latter was not sold in stores and could only be ordered direct from Nintendo of America. In the United Kingdom, the N64 was shipped with a RF modulator and switch set, but was still fully compatible with the other cables. The system supported games with a video display ratio of up to 16:9 widescreen. However only seven of its games used this feature. These were; Banjo-Tooie, Donkey Kong 64, Goldeneye 007, Jet Force Gemini, Perfect Dark, Starshot: Space Circus Fever, and Turok 2: Seeds of Evil.

Games

A total of 387 games were released for the console though few were exclusively sold in Japan, in competition with around 1,100 games released for the rival PlayStation. However, the Nintendo 64 game library included a high number of critically acclaimed and widely sold games. Super Mario 64 was the console's best selling game (selling over eleven million copies) and also received praise from critics. GoldenEye 007 was important in the evolution of the first person shooter, and has since been named the greatest in the genre. Marc Russo quoted The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as one of the greatest games of all time, and, in his words, remains "to this day ... the finest game I've ever played across any platform or genre."

Graphics

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 Saturn or the PlayStation. This was due to the latter two using nearest-neighbor interpolation, resulting in textures that were pixelated.

However, the smaller storage size of ROM cartridges limited the number of available textures, resulting in games that had blurry graphics. This was caused by the liberal use of stretched, low-resolution textures, and 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 image. This fit the themes of many games, and allowed this style of imagery a sharp look. Cartridges for some later games, such as Resident Evil 2 and Sin & Punishment: Successor of the Earth, featured more ROM space, allowing for more detailed graphics.

Production

The era's competing systems from Sony and Sega (the PlayStation and Saturn, respectively) used CD-ROM discs to store their games. These discs are much cheaper to manufacture and distribute, resulting in lower costs to third-party game publishers. As a result, game developers who had traditionally supported Nintendo game consoles were now developing games for the competition because of the higher profit margins found on CD-based platforms.

Cartridges took longer to manufacture than CDs, with each production run (from order to delivery) taking two weeks or more. By contrast, extra copies of a CD based game could be ordered with a lead time of a few days. This meant that publishers of N64 titles had to attempt to predict demand for a game ahead of its release. They risked being left with a surplus of expensive cartridges for a failed game or a weeks-long shortage of product if they underestimated a game's popularity.

The cost of producing an N64 cartridge was far higher than producing a CD. Publishers had to pass these higher expenses to the consumer and as a result, N64 games tended to sell for higher prices than PlayStation games. While most PlayStation games rarely exceeded US$50, N64 games could reach US$79.99, such as the first pressing of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Games in Sony's line of PlayStation Greatest Hits budget line retailed for US$19.95, while Nintendo's equivalent Player's Choice line retailed for US$29.95. In the United Kingdom, N64 games were priced ?54.95 at their time of release, while PlayStation games were priced at ?44.95. In the United States games were priced at around roughly $49.99 at the time of their release.

Cartridge-copy counter-measures

Each Nintendo 64 cartridge contains a lockout chip (similar to the 10NES) to prevent manufacturers from creating unauthorized copies of games and discourage production of unlicensed games. Unlike previous versions, the N64 lockout chip contains a seed value which is used to calculate a checksum of the game's boot code. To discourage playing of copied games by piggybacking on a real cartridge, Nintendo produced five different versions of the chip. During the boot process, and occasionally while the game is running, the N64 computes the checksum of the boot code and verifies it with the lockout chip in the game cartridge, failing to boot if the check fails.