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N64

N64
I met a guy in Dupont Circle yesterday who sold me a Nintendo 64 system with a couple games for pennies. I always liked the N64 at the time that the Playstation was ruling the world, but my room-mates in college only had the PSX, so I was stuck mooching… errrr… using what they had. At the time, the N64 however was more advanced than the PSX, but fell victim to Nintendo’s horrible marketing, coupled with Sony’s complete embrace of third-party developers. While the guts of the system were superior to the PSX, the choice to use ROMs to store games was a bad idea (and is the last system to do so outside of the GameBoy). First, the early carts were unable to store high resolution texture maps in ROM, therefore much lower quality maps had to be used (although later the Resident Evil franchise used higher capacity ROMs, thus eliminating this drawback). As a result, the maps came out extremely blurred when displayed, thus giving the N64 a bad reputation as a system with poor graphics capabilities (which was far from the case). While ROMs were certainly quick loading, hard to pirate, and robust; they were extremely expensive to manufacture, therefore driving many third-party developers into the outstretched arms of the PSX where the CD-based games were cheap by comparison. The N64 was a beast at its core:

CPU : MIPS 64-bit CPU
An extremely clean RISC processor. Yuki and I met in a computer architecture class where we studied the MIPS CPU from the ground up. Perhaps meeting my future wife while studying this CPU has made me biased?

Clock : 93 MHz
By comparison: PSX at 33 MHz

Not to mention that the N64 was the first console to have a true 64-bit architecture (while the Atari Jaguar was first, its 64-bitness is in dispute) and the first to support MIP mapping.

Where the N64 really shines however, is in the strength of its library of excellent games. We can envision a typical game system’s library of games as a pyramid-like structure. That is, the very best games occupy a very small percentage of the total library. For every truly excellent game, there are 2 very good games. Likewise, for every very good game there are 4 good games… and so on and so forth. Where the N64 is unique in this respect is in the fact that most of its excellent games are among the best console game ever developed. This diamonds include the following:

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Paper Mario, Super Mario 64, GoldenEye 007, Mario Kart 64 (multiplayer mode), Donkey Kong 64, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, 1080 Snowboarding, and Perfect Dark. All of these games are classics, and are worth the purchase price alone.

The final allure of the N64 for me was the rabid hacking scene led by Dextrose.com. I look forward to geeking out on this bad-boy.
-m