Tina's NINTENDO 64 Shrine

Pages

15 Essential Games | Emulation | Playlists | My Personal Library

Game logs

Super Mario 64 | GoldenEye 007 | Banjo-Kazooie | Banjo-Tooie

Pictures

Show your colours	Control deck	Packed-in controller
Rumble Pak	Disk Drive	iQue: The Chinese N64
Super Mario 64	GoldenEye 007	Mario Kart 64
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron	The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time	Turok: Dinosaur Hunter

Datasheet

*Vital Statistics*
Hardware generation	Fifth
Type	Home console
Release Dates	JP: 23 June 1996 NA: 29 September 1996 EU: 1 March 1997 WW: December 1997
Discontinued	30 April 2002
Launch titles	•Saikyo Habu Shogi (Japan only) •Pilotwings 64 •Super Mario 64
Terminal titles (NA)	•The Powerpuff Girls: Chemical X-Traction •Razor Freestyle Scooter •NFL Blitz Special Edition
Terminal titles (EU)	•Pokémon Stadium 2 •Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 •Paper Mario
Terminal titles (Japan)	•Jikkyo Powerful Pro Yakyu Basic-ban 2001 •Hamster Monogatari 64 •Doubutsu no Mori •Derby Stallion 64
Final games	•Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 (NA) •Mario Party 3 (EU) •Bomberman 64 (Japan)
Competitors	•Sony PlayStation •Sega Saturn •Sega Dreamcast •Atari Jaguar •3DO Interactive Multiplayer
Related	iQue Player (CHN, 18 November 2003) LodgeNet (US, September 1999)
Predecessor	Super NES
Successor	GameCube
Release position	4th of 9
Lasting contributions	•Haptic feedback •3D Platforming games •Party games
*Tech Specs*
Processor	NEC VR4300 @ 93.7 MHz
Memory	4 MB RDRAM, expandable to 8 MB
Graphics	SGI Reality Coprocessor
Multiplayer	4-player simultaneous
Smallest game	Super Mario 64 (8 MB)
Largest game	Conker's Bad Fur Day (64 MB)
*Tonnage*
Best seller	Super Mario 64 (11.9 million)
Best seller that was not a pack-in	Super Smash Bros. (5.55 million)
Best performers	•Nintendo EAD (54.78 million) •Rareware (28.57 million) •HAL Laboratory (10.95 million) •LucasArts (7.87 million) •Hudsonsoft (7.09 million)
Console units sold	32.9 million
As of?	2002 discontinuation
Market position	2
Behind what?	Sony PlayStation (102.49 million)
Best performing region	North America (20.63 million)
Worst performing region	Japan (5.54 million)
*Game stats*
Best game	The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Worst game	Superman: The New Adventures
Most outstandingly average game	The New Tetris
Longest-lived game	Super Smash Bros.
Most-forgotten game	Diddy Kong Racing
Most hyped game	Pokémon Stadium
Most shafted game	Doom 64
Series that just wouldn't die	NFL Quarterback Club
Game that should have been, but wasn't	007 Tomorrow Never Dies
Game that shouldn't have been, but was	Earthworm Jim 3D

Fun stuff

The Nintendo 64's product code prefix, "NUS", is derived from its working name of Ultra 64 (Nintendo Ultra Sixty-four). It was the first of Nintendo's home consoles to have the same casing design in all markets and the first to use its working name as its product code prefix (though the Famicom went by "HVC", after its working name of "Home Video Computer"; and the Super Famicom by "SHVC" for "Super HVC"). Nintendo has retained this policy of international standardisation into the present day.

The console comes with a "Jumper Pak" in the expansion port slot at the front, behind the N64 logo. While commonly thought to do nothing but take up space, the Jumper Pak actually provides a termination point for signals going to the RAM, as it works around a common signal-reflection glitch inherent in Rambus-variant DRAM. The console will not boot without either a Jumper Pak or Expansion Pak in this slot. Until the Jumper Pak Removal Tool was released alongside the Expansion Pak, there was no officially-sanctioned way of removing it from the console. Originally, Nintendo's official stance was that the user would void their warranty if the Jumper Pak was removed, however it is not known how repair personnel were supposed to tell if this had been done.

Talking of the Expansion Pak, a commonly-held myth is that Donkey Kong 64 required it for reasons the developers did not understand. Chris Marlow, a developer working on Conker's Bad Fur Day, in a different part of the Rareware complex from the DK64 team, claimed it was required to work around an unspecified bug that could not be worked around otherwise, and that they bundled the Expansion Pak in with the game "at great expense" to Rareware. Art director, Mark Stevenson, dispelled the rumour, stating they had known about Nintendo's plan to make a memory expansion for the N64 for a while and had always intended to use it to achieve dynamic lighting effects that would not otherwise have been possible. The choice to bundle DK64 with the Expansion Pak was Nintendo's, not Rareware's.

Since we're at Rare right now, GoldenEye 007 contains a number of inside jokes related to the internal hardware of the Nintendo 64. Two circuit boards collectible in the Silo map refer to the RSP and RDP— Reality Signal Processor and Reality Display Processor— the 2 halves of SGI's Reality Coprocessor. A somewhat uncommon weapon in the game, RCP-90, is a double reference to the FN P-90 (the real weapon used as a model) and the Reality Coprocessor (RCP).

Talking of GoldenEye 007, there were stories of the developers trying to make it so you could reload your onscreen weapon by cycling the Rumble Pak in and out of the controller's expansion slot. While this may have been floated as an idea during a meeting, it was never pursued and no attempt was made to make this work.

The Rumble Pak was, ostensibly, the world's first attempt at a personal haptic feedback device. Originally packed in with StarFox 64 / LylatWars, it would prove to be one of the N64's lasting contributions to consumer electronics. A similar spinning counterweight system makes up the vibrate function of smartphones. Haptic feedback continues to be incorporated into most game controllers into the present day (with the noteable exception of the Logitech F310 currently sitting next to my keyboard as I write this, which I use to play N64 games on M64Py).

The console had 2 emulators developed for it during its support cycle: Project UnReality and UltraHLE. PUR could only run Mortal Kombat Trilogy and WaveRace 64 as far as their N64 Logo screens, but UHLE could run several game ROMs to a playable level. Precisely which are not explicitly known, but it most likely included Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. UHLE's emulation method (high-level emulation, hence "HLE") intercepts games' calls to C libraries and re-implements them, thereby obviating the need for a 64-bit processor or any precise signal-level emulation. Nintendo, of course, objected and issued a Cease-and-Desist order immediately upon learning of this, but UHLE's original developers had already released the source code under a FOSS license and shut down their website before Nintendo could react. Beyond their screennames, RealityMan and Episilon; their identities were never discovered. UHLE was forked into other projects, such as SupraHLE, but plugin-based emulators such as 1964 and Project64 on Windows and Mupen64 on Linux proved to be a more efficient way to emulate N64 on personal computers. My first emulator was Project64 v1.6 on Windows XP, where I used it mostly to test level modifier GameShark codes for GoldenEye 007 (the best I could do without a controller adapter).

The rudiments of Banjo-Kazooie's "Stop'n'Swop" feature (explained in greater detail on that game's log page) hinged upon the slow speed at which the N64's RDRAM cleared itself after the console was powered off. Nintendo ordered Rareware to stop development of that feature, as they were concerned players would damage their systems by removing the cartridge while the game was running in order to save time. The same year that Banjo-Kazooie was released, the new N64 hardware revision included a new generation of DRAM that cleared itself within 2 seconds of losing power. By the time the N64 ceased production, DRAM clear speed was down to 1/4 of a second, which would have made Stop'n'Swop features impossible to access, had it been implemented.

Another commonly-held rumour was that Super Mario 64's working title was "Super Mario FX", which would suggest it was to run on the Super NES using the Super FX chip. In fact, "Super Mario FX" was the codename given to the Super FX chip itself and never referred to any Mario game design.

There are 63 games that support the Expansion Pak, however only 5 absolutely require it:
- Donkey Kong 64
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
- Perfect Dark
- San Francisco Rush 2049
- StarCraft 64

Despite being such large, expansive games, Banjo-Tooie and Conker's Bad Fur Day surprisingly do not require the Expansion Pak. In fact, they do not behave any differently with it as opposed to the ordinary Jumper Pak. This is due to much of those games' engines being purpose-built in RCP microcode. Rareware games, in general, were able to keep memory requirements down through liberal use of vertex colouring (ie. using the game engine to apply colour to textures, rather than baking colour into the texture file itself), thereby allowing them to do more with the limited memory space than other developers could, including Nintendo EAD itself.

The Nintendo 64 is looked upon as a commercial failure by Nintendo, contemporary business analysts, and game reviewers. However, it consistently outperformed the Sony PlayStation in the North American market during its entire 6-year run. The 100+ million sales of PlayStation consoles is owing to its having been sold for 12 consecutive years. The Nintendo 64 exited the Asian, European, and Oceania markets as many as 24 months before the release of the GameCube, making North America the only (official) market where the Nintendo 64 and GameCube were being sold concurrently.

HOME