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Lol this stood out for me (although probably just semantics...):
"Reality Co-Processor running at 62.5 MHz." What big dreams we had back then to try and"simulate reality" with only 62.5Mhz :)
Well done author... well done Nintendo !
For 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!
My main use for C and C++ are actually their shading language derived dialects.
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.
Interestingly, I feel the opposite. The inferior texture memory means that many games just used Gouraud shading (or sprites) instead, which was quite clean. At the time, I felt that N64 games looked cleaner than PS games, mostly because of the textures, and I also think they have aged (slightly) better. At least those games that didn't aim for realism - Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are still quite playable, whi…
[1] There are other factors of course: SD TV resolutions are low so when you hook a 32-bit 90s console up to a large modern flat panel HD or 4K TV with games running at a resolution of around 320 x 240 the pixels are MASSIVE. In addition polygon counts are low, draw distances are often low, and so it goes on. Depending on your setup games can look considerably worse on a modern TV than they would have done on more modestly sized 90s CRT screens. To be clear I'm talking about SD TVs here, not CRT monitors, which could support much higher resolutions and would therefore suffer from some of the same problems as modern flat panels in terms of making the graphics look too sharp.
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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…
Yeah, but RDRAM gave them one big benefit: Even with the price premium of RDRAM back then, it was the cheapest route to getting 500mb/sec of memory bandwidth. The Playstation by comparison used EDO (Based on eyeballing the pictures on wikipedia, baseline was 70ns/60ns for CPU and Video memory.) But, It's main bus was under 133mb/sec, and the fastest it could read from CD was 300kb/sec. EDO Memory would have kneecappe…
The N64 launched at $200, the Voodoo at $300. Of course you would additionally need a computer to run the Voodoo, but I remember thinking the N64 was already way too expensive back in the day. It would've been even more expensive to support a 64-bit memory bus.
Brilliant article ! I love these in-depth "old-hardware" articles with my morning coffee. (It's only 8am here in South Africa) Lol this stood out for me (although probably just semantics...): "Reality Co-Processor running at 62.5 MHz." What big dreams we had back then to try and"simulate reality" with only 62.5Mhz :) Well done author... well done Nintendo !
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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.
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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.
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 also included their own Easter eggs: The rabbit you need to catch beneath the castle in Super Mario 64 is named "MIPS". :) https://www.mariowiki.com/MIPS
Aw, they should have brought it back and renamed it ARM…
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Amazing. Is there somewhere I can watch this talk?
It wasn't recorded unfortunately. The source behind the text of the most recent slides starts here if you'd like to read it: https://github.com/monocasa/n64-slides-apr/blob/caae25f397c5... I should probably save off pictures and put it into a pdf or something where it could be more easily accessible.
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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.
It might not be visible from a regular programmers' perspective (i.e. You don't need to read https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf to write a website) but FPGAs are absoutely everywhere already, e.g. Xilinx (the Intel of the FPGA market... as opposed to Intel who are the AMD of the FPGA market) have Market Cap of $21Bn which is quite a lot for a company that is both fairly obscure to investors a…