Why was the Nintendo 64 so hard to develop games for ? | MVG

The Nintendo 64 was an impressive console. Silicon Graphics and Nintendo pulled off the unthinkable - the precision of accurate 3D hardware on a $199 consumer home console. Yet developers complained that the system was too complex and overly difficult to develop games on. In this episode we take a closer look at some of the complexities developers faced when making games for the N64.

Thanks to CrashOveride for his help

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#Nintendo #GameDev #SiliconGraphics

[MadamLava]

"Alright team! Lets learn to develop for the N64! First off, lets read the manual on addressing the RAM..."
Manual: "Dont use the RAM, I beg of you."

[JAzzWoods-ikvv]

"Reading from cartridge was faster than reading from ram"
That sounds... interesting

[renakunisaki]

That puny texture cache really neutered the system. Even a secondary external cache probably would have been a huge help.

[wasd____]

Nitpick: a five-stage pipeline doesn't mean that the MIPS chip can execute five instructions at the same time, exactly. It means that it can have up to five instructions in progress at any one time, with each at a different stage of the pipeline. Only one instruction starts and/or finishes per clock cycle. That's a pretty important distinction: a chip that can start, run, and complete five totally concurrent instructions at once would have been much more impressive and powerful (and expensive) than just a single-threaded chip with a five-stage pipeline.

[shkdzn]

I remember working on the N64 back in '99.. was a junior developer working on South Park Rally, well.. originally it was a port of Deth Karz (from Melbourne House) to the N64 which got canned, and then the game ended up quite differently. 4K texture cache was painful but just had to be smart about how you render. R4K assembly was pretty fun though.

[faustianblur]

That generation of early 3D consoles was so interesting for the different approaches to the same problems. The N64 took the approach of cutting down professional grade hardware to consumer level prices, leading to some difficult limitations particularly in terms of memory. By comparison the Saturn built much more on the previous generation of bespoke sprite/tile warping technology while the PlayStation implemented a lot of basics of modern 3D hardware from the ground up, but left out all the more taxing features.

[mamifero.efimero]

I would also like "Why X console was developer friendly?" series

[tremendoza]

I would love a "what could N64 games look like if storage wasn't an issue" video 🙂

[snetmotnosrorb]

To their defence nobody knew how to design a viable real time polygonal/3D rendering system at the time, especially not in the consumer space. It was a completely new paradigm. Still mind boggling that Silicon Graphics could design a chip with such a laughable small texture cache even for that time when the system was so dependant on that. It was so much ahead in everything else.

[dngale]

I think that it would've been awesome if Nintendo, instead of putting every single game on a cartridge, would have put the games on a cd and put in a cache inside of the console the size of a N64 cartridge. This would've drove up the price of the console by a bit, but it would've given developers more cache space to work with and allowed developers to also gain the benefits of a CD with its cheaper cost and higher storage capacity.

[mightylink]

I remember the texture filtering in Ocarina of Time really blew my mind back in the day, even though it was low res the textures looked really smooth compared to the PlayStation where you would always see each jagged square pixel in games like FF8.

[pleasedontwatchthese]

I liked looking at the office dev docs. They treated the developers as if this is the first time they have seen 3D. Which was true for some at the time. Nintendo explained all the super basic stuff, like what is a polygon. I find that funny because today how could you work for a AAA studio and not know what a polygon was, but this was the mid 90s and Nintendo's first system to be fully 3D so that makes sense.

[ModernVintageGamer]

If you developed Nintendo 64 games back it the day, let me know about your experiences (feel free to email me)


A few points.
- I didn't talk about DMA in this video as i the main focus was on the graphics side. However if you want to understand how DMA worked on the N64, check out Rodrigo Copetti's blog (link in description). tl;dr - the implementation is NOT good
- at 1:54 i meant to say 16 and 8 kilobyte instead of bit
- stay safe!

[MobileDecay]

I never thought it was easy to code for just based on the struggles people still deal with emulating it.

[thebasketballhistorian]

Noobs = the cartridge format was the N64's weakness

MVG = 4kb texture cache, RDRAM, pixel fill rate were the N64's weaknesses

[Padge]

In case anyone wondered how much $199 in 1996 would equate to today it's around $384.77. So when I think back to my mum saying no it's too much money for one it makes sense to me now. Didn't show her i was gutted, I knew she struggled when we were younger.
I kinda feel bad for asking now.

[wishonpleiades]

So, the Stop N' Swap feature from Banjo-Kazooie was actually the result of Rare trying to take advantage of the Ultra 64's high memory latency, since it allowed you to power off the console and swap game cartridges while still keeping data in RAM for a short time. Which means that Nintendo accidentally removed a feature from an N64 game by upgrading the N64!

EDIT: It has been pointed out to me that memory retention after power off and latency are not the same thing

[djk]

1:18 : I clean, restore, and RGB mod a lot of these systems, and every time I open one up, I look at, enjoy, and appreciate the layout and design of the motherboard. The few chips are packaged so nicely on the board, connected by unique curved traces. It's such a beautiful layout, direct to the point with almost nothing wasted, especially space! I don't favor the system or its games that much (I've played very few games and since I didn't have one growing up I don't have any nostalgia for it) but I absolutely respect the engineers who created the final board layouts.

It's a shame whoever picked out the plastics for the case chose a mix that got so brittle with age. Advice for anyone taking a console apart: when reassembling a screw that goes into plastic, rotate it counter-clockwise until you feel it "click" and sink down into the threads. Then tighten. This plastic is very brittle and it's super important to NOT cross-thread through it lest you break off posts. The plastic's only saving grace is it responds VERY well to standard cyanoacrylate super glue. As long as the plastic doesn't shatter into pieces but breaks off cleanly, chances are a superglued piece will bond stronger than the now 20+ years old plastic.

[kernow]

The microcode updates factor 5 did were very impressive, got so much more out of it than the ones that came with the sdk

[Cuzjudd]

Sad feels when he says we're gonna leave it here for this video :(