Super Mario 64 for the PS1

Realistically it wasn't even "We only have X dollars to spend". They needed the console to have a final budget and they really could have "just" added more transistors dedicated to that texture unit without significantly altering prices or profit.

But hardware was actively transitioning and what we "knew" one year was gone the next and Nintendo was lucky to have made enough right choices to support enough good games to survive the transition. They just got some bets wrong and calculated some tradeoffs poorly.

For example, almost everything Kaze is showing off, all the optimizations were technically doable on original hardware, but devs were crunching to meet deadlines and nobody even thought to wonder whether "lets put a texture on this cube" needed another ten hours of engineering time to optimize. Cartridges needed to be constructed by Christmas. A lot of games made optimization tradeoffs that were just wrong, and didn't test them to find out. Like the HellDivers 2 game size issue.

Sega meanwhile flubbed the transition like four different ways and died. Now they have the blue hedgehog hooked up to a milking machine. Their various transition consoles are hilariously bad. "Our cpu and rasterizer can't actually do real polygon rendering and can't fake it fast enough to do 3D graphics anyway. Oh, well what about two of them?"

You are right about the RSP/RDP distinction. My point is that removing transistors from one chip doesn't magically let you add more transistors to another chip, that's not how IC fabrication works. And the CPU was not a custom design, it was a VR4300 licensed by NEC from the original R4300.

Anyway, the real problem is that TMEM was not a hardware-managed cache, but a scratchpad RAM fully under the control of the programmer, which meant that the whole texture had to fit under a meagre 4 kB of RAM! It is the same mistake that Sony and IBM later made with the Cell.

Being a teenager, I honestly viewed the N64 (Ultra 64) as being an unstoppable force during the early news. We even had a 486 PC running Doom since the early-to-mid 90s. LOL. I couldn't wait to see what Doom would be like on the N64.

In typical fanboyism, I viewed the main SGI systems are the superior systems to the N64.. but they were for the office.. not the home. The other was Panasonic M2.

Of course.. either the N64 was released in the UK or not far away, I remember walking into PC World (a cool computer shop at the time) with a demo of Tomb Raider. I believe it was running a Voodoo1 card and the realisation kicked in. The N64 is already surpassed.

Wasn't long before we had a Voodoo2 card and the first game we played was a demo of Turok:Dinosaur Hunter. It was much better than the N64 version (which I owned)

Once I started playing GLQuake it was a PC master race.

It was at this point I snapped out being a Nintendo 'fanboy' and accept that hardware gets you so far... its the games that make a console.

I still think the N64 was a great console. Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time, etc. Great memories. Also got a Gamecube, Wii, and Switch.

As I got older and snapped out of the fanboyism, I realised the Playstation was a good console. I am on the fence with the Cartridge vs CD argument. There are cases for both. If we look at Mario 64, many aspects worked well on Cartridge. I guess faster load times and transition of music. With CD.. you have CD quality music and more variation of textures and level design (generally speaking)

Putting all the aside, Playstation is just as much capable of doing a good Super Mario 64 port despite the (many like) PS1 jaggy polygons.