21–30 of 77 posts
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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
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> 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.
Sure. The Afterburner Card that Apple is selling to accelerate ProRes decoding on the newest Mac Pro is an FPGA. They’ve opened it up to third parties like Red as well iirc.
On 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.
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Well, I would guess twice as much and four times as much respectively. I mean RAM is cheap today but if you wanted 128GB of it today it’d still run you like, $700. I can’t pretend to know what this particular type of RAM cost back in the day, but given how relatively cutting edge the machine was I can only guess it was not particularly inexpensive...
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.
Plus, adding more texture memory would have meant respinning the RCP silicon. That would have been a significant expense for marginal returns.
Besides, Nintendo had already sold a memory upgrade in the form of the Expansion Pak. A second memory upgrade which couldn't even be installed into existing consoles would have been a very difficult sell, and could have soured customers on their future consoles. ("Why buy a Game Cube when they'll just release a Game Cube Plus next year?")
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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.
(I think you're getting distracted by the terms "digital" and "analog". It may help to think about this in terms of discrete and continuous inputs instead.)
I get the nostalgia angle -- but why are we discussing a console that's >20 years old?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I would guess twice as much and four times as much respectively. I mean RAM is cheap today but if you wanted 128GB of it today it’d still run you like, $700. I can’t pretend to know what this particular type of RAM cost back in the day, but given how relatively cutting edge the machine was I can only guess it was not particularly inexpensive...
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.
the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_accessories#Expans... raised main memory from 4mb to 8mb.
it was required for one of the Zelda games, but also helped with graphics for some games if it was inserted.
seemed to be a decent success.
On 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 ho…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I would guess twice as much and four times as much respectively. I mean RAM is cheap today but if you wanted 128GB of it today it’d still run you like, $700. I can’t pretend to know what this particular type of RAM cost back in the day, but given how relatively cutting edge the machine was I can only guess it was not particularly inexpensive...
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.
Earlier 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