One of my favourite little easter eggs in Goldeneye is that during the Silo mission, two of the satellite components you have to steal are the N64's RSP and RDP:
https://twitter.com/007goldeneye25/status/109829415491907174...
Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis
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Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis
#12I don't think I would have gotten as interested in gaming if it weren't for Nintendo's decisions with the N64. The native bilinear texture filtering, Z-buffer, and subpixel model rendering make such an enormous difference to me I'd have found the Playstation unplayable.
Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis
#13For someone just starting to learn about computer architecture at a low level (rather embarrassing for someone who's been in the industry for over a decade), this is a really interesting read, and it's helping concepts like pipelining and caching to gel.
Hardware used to be so exotic!
> Hardware used to be so exotic!
It might circle back around to being exotic again, if FPGAs take off and more work is done on highly-specialized task-specific hardware, as opposed to building the fastest general-purpose chips you can and beating problems to death with sheer speed.
Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis
#14I don't think I would have gotten as interested in gaming if it weren't for Nintendo's decisions with the N64. The native bilinear texture filtering, Z-buffer, and subpixel model rendering make such an enormous difference to me I'd have found the Playstation unplayable.
Hmm. I found the PlayStation to be... extremely playable (at the time, of course)
Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hardware used to be so exotic!
> Hardware used to be so exotic! It might circle back around to being exotic again, if FPGAs take off and more work is done on highly-specialized task-specific hardware, as opposed to building the fastest general-purpose chips you can and beating problems to death with sheer speed.
Is this a thing that's happening? I remember how cool I thought FPGAs were from my college CE classes. Seems intuitive to me that you would want to specialize the hardware once you have a process figured out. The fact that FPGAs are upgradable makes it even more of a no brainer to me.
Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis
#16On the cost-saving point, I always understood that the limited 4kb texture memory led to lots of games having really muddy, blurry textures. How much more would have 8kb or 16kb cost? It seems a small cost saving that had a pretty large, negative impact.
Regarding simply having 8/16/32kB, the cache was integrated with the chip itself, it wasn't RAM that lived on the motherboard. So adding more would have required a larger chip.
It was a multifaceted problem, and was ultimately a design flaw/oversight rather than someone saying "I think 4kB is enough memory to store all the textures". The problem is less that the cache was small, it's more that Nintendo's plans for how awesome RDRAM and a unified memory architecture didn't pan out.
Problem #1: There was no dedicated video memory. All RAM on the N64 was shared RAM. So framerates tanked if you didn't have most of your stuff in cache. Keep in mind the framebuffer also lived in this unified memory area, so the video chip was already very noisy on the memory bus.
Problem #2: The unified shared system RAM was RDRAM, not SDRAM. And the latency on RDRAM is absolutely terrible. So the already expensive cost of using RAM was compounded.
If the N64 did what the playstation and saturn did and just have dedicated video/system RAM, and made this RAM relatively low latency SDRAM instead of the relatively high latency RDRAM, this 4kB limitation wouldn't have mattered.
Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis
#17I don't think I would have gotten as interested in gaming if it weren't for Nintendo's decisions with the N64. The native bilinear texture filtering, Z-buffer, and subpixel model rendering make such an enormous difference to me I'd have found the Playstation unplayable.
To me, N64 continued the video game "tradition" I knew from the 16-bit era. Colorful, fast-paced, responsive. PSX games by contrast were dour, slow-paced, and controlled poorly because of Sony's initial failure to consider how digital control wouldn't work in a 3D environment.
Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis
#18I get the nostalgia angle -- but why are we discussing a console that's >20 years old?
Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis
#19I don't think I would have gotten as interested in gaming if it weren't for Nintendo's decisions with the N64. The native bilinear texture filtering, Z-buffer, and subpixel model rendering make such an enormous difference to me I'd have found the Playstation unplayable.
To me, N64 continued the video game "tradition" I knew from the 16-bit era. Colorful, fast-paced, responsive. PSX games by contrast were dour, slow-paced, and controlled poorly because of Sony's initial failure to consider how digital control wouldn't work in a 3D environment.
The N64's control sticks used digital rotary encoders.
Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should have released a Nintendo 64 Plus sometime before the release of the Gamecube that would have doubled its RAM to provide hi-res textures.
64DD was an expansion to the 64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64DD . It was a commercial flop
It may have done better if Nintendo didn't take so long to develop and release it.
I bought one on eBay, and it's a quirky device. It's essentially a glorified floppy drive with proprietary disks, and it makes loud, albeit amusing scanning noises.
Every Nintendo console prior to the Wii had some sort of "expansion" or upgrade capability for future peripherals to be added. Hardware revisions took the place of this model.