How different would the landscape have been if Nintendo opted

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>>2772356

shit would have taken longer to load.

Would honestly be interesting.
The console would had been a lot pricier but games not cost $80. But at the same time there would had been load times.
I think the biggest change would be the GC since it would make no sense for Nintendo to go from CDs to mini CDs and having backwards capability would be a big thing,

Probably a better library.

Yes, it would have much longer load times, but I don't even care, there were si few games on the system that interested me.

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>>2772380

yeah, N64 only had mario and zelda desu

Longer load times, squareinx entertainment, cheaper to buy for, more moving part's in the system that will break, easier to program for.

>>2772402
Make moving parts stronger, or alternatively, make it so that opening up and getting to that part, then taking it and replacing it, is simple, and can be done by anyone, and the breaking part can be ordered from Nintendo or sold in stores. This also opens things up for higher quality 3rd party replacement parts for those who want them.

Maybe guns have spoiled me in this regard?

>>2772434

>Make moving parts stronger

All mechanical devices are destined to fail, regardless of material quality.

>make it so that opening up and getting to that part, then taking it and replacing it, is simple, and can be done by anyone

Opening it up and replacing the part was a very simple task. The reason most people fear opening electronic devices is because they don't really pay attention to how everything is pieced together when taking it apart, and then not being able to put it back together again.

>the breaking part can be ordered from Nintendo or sold in stores

Never gonna happen. Nintendo has always made profit repairing broken consoles, and they will continue to do so. Especially in today's age where your average kid ends up whining and bitching to their parents how they bricked their console because they didn't follow some easy instructions on how to soft mod it.

maybe it would be the only zelda game that isn't an aesthetically stale hunk of shit

>>2772356
It would be Sony Play Station 2

>>2772484

this opinion triggers me!

>>2772356
Would've looked like shit, but cutscenes could be good

>>2772402
>easier to program for
Nah, you win some you lose some.

You wouldn't have to spend time working out how to decompress your assets on the cartridge, but on the other hand you would have to come up with a more sophisticated loading/streaming system due to the slower read.

>>2772529
Eh, it looked mostly like shit even with cartridges anyways.

>>2772356

Not much.
It#s not only the cart size, back then designing a 3D- environment was a pretty difficult task so they still would have wanted to make the most out of each asset even if having more space. There just maybe would have been some FMV scenes.

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>>2772589

No for 1998 standards it didn't.

Pic related is a disc-based N64 game, does it look too much different than cartidge games? You decide.

>>2773265
I'm not that guy nor arguing for his point, but as I understand it the 64DD was more like a big floppy drive with the focus on rewriting data and couldn't match a CD at all in terms of storage

>>2772356
Not at all. Nintendo still would have fucked over literally every third party dev and they all would have still run screaming to sony.

At best, games like OoT would have been two discs and the N64 would have gotten more PS1 ports. That's about it.

>>2773291

>fucked over literally

lewd

>>2773284

A disc could hold 64 MB. Not much in comparison to CD but still double than your biggest cart at the time

I honestly think Nintendo would have to be broken up if they went with CDs, because they would've monopolized the market

It totally would have been a better console. Yeah longer load times, but I dont think anyone was really complaining about the load times for the PS1, they really weren't that long. I think people complaining about it today are just comparing it to today, but back then it wasnt so bad.

>>2773338
>but I dont think anyone was really complaining about the load times for the PS1, they really weren't that long. I think people complaining about it today are just comparing it to today, but back then it wasnt so bad.
It's the complete opposite.

People were complaining about it much more at that time having recently been weened off cartridges in the previous generation.

>>2773338
>but I dont think anyone was really complaining about the load times for the PS1

I surely did, but yeah for today's standards when consoles ask you for firmware update often and games have to install load onto the console's HDD, yeah, I guess it's not a big deal, but back then we were spoiled with games that loaded instantly from cartidges.

>>2773367
>>2773375
Maybe I was too young to remember anyone complaining about it.

>>2773379

what's more, PS1 fat are known for having lens problems (the whole "turn console upside down to work"... I never knew this trick as a kid, might have saved me some trouble).

Saturn loading times aren't that bad, Saturn lens seems to be a lot more durable too.

Anyway my first encounter with "now loading" was when I got my first PC, a 486 in 1994. It really bothered me a lot, being used to NES, Genesis and SNES.

>>2773385
>Saturn loading times aren't that bad
It's mostly because Saturn reads CDs very slightly faster (20KB/s faster) and has 4x bigger CD-ROM cache than the PS1.

How many load times do you remember sitting through on Nintendo's games for Gamecube? Load times wouldn't have been bad on a 64CD game because Nintendo knows their own hardware in and out and would have worked around it. Eveything would have benefited

>>2773443
>How many load times do you remember sitting through on Nintendo's games for Gamecube?
That's because those little discs have virtually no seek time since they are so small.

Come to think of it, I reckon mini-CDs would have been a good compromise for N64. They hold about 150MB of data which is pretty good (almost 3x bigger than largest cartridge).

The N64 would have likely been a much more successful console if it used CDs.

With a bigger library and better sound and FMVs, games could have been more varied.

SquareEnix would have produced gold.

Piracy would have been a major contributor. N64s would have sold more because games would have been cheaper and easier to copy. Do not underestimate the buying power of piracy.

Countless PS1 consoles were bought simply because everyone knew there was somebody out there in their area making and selling pirate copies of games at a few dollars a disc.

I myself remember sitting in a small office on a couch flicking through a book of listed games and checking them off one at a time. Dozens of games chosen by the end of the book. For less than $100, I had gone from nothing to about 40 games in an afternoon. A CD wallet was even thrown in for free.

My N64 was just incapable of that. I cherished my N64 more, but only ended up buying SM64. Really, ONE GAME.

Borrowing from friends and hiring from Blockbuster was the only way I could play other N64 games back in the day. $70 a game was far too much.

The ability to pirate games is the number 1 important factor in my choice of new games/systems because of that experience as a teen.

Man I love EverDrives!

>>2773493

I have always thought that. For the N64 use a miniCD-alike, for its successor use a miniDVD-alike.

They may have been as far as to go do what more like.

>>2775184
What's the point of using a mini-CD when it's that small of a size, though. The biggest advantage of using CD back then was it's enormous size. You could put FMV, great sounding audio... basically not compromising. Which is kind of why the N64 sucked.

>>2772434
>Make it like Playstation

>>2775539
No matter how you look at its size was "enormous" compared to any cart

>miniCD
>mini-CD
>everything on the intarwebz calls it a mini cd
>tfw when i die no one will remember what they were originally called

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>>2772356
Even if it solved the storage issue and manufacturing costs, there's still much work to do with all the other factors around the N64. First, Nintendo's strict licensing policies at the time. Then, the architecture was still a bit unusual for its time - so aside from avoiding compression techniques, the N64 would still be quite difficult to develop for.

One thing that's for sure, unlike cartridges, CDs can't have batteries for save data, so either those meager "123-page" Controller Paks would definitely have to store more data or Nintendo would include some kind of internal backup like the Saturn as the bare minimum for save data, with expansions available through Controller Paks.

As >>2773493 said, Nintendo would probably deal with the load times in a better way than Sony (and Sega, to an extent)

But yeah, Nintendo dropped the ball big time with the cartridges. I mean, they were already so expensive to produce and unlike SNES, they weren't even designed to provide additional features such as the dedicated chips (like SuperFX, SA-1 or DSP-x)

>>2772474
not him, but I'm fairly sure you could order replacement SNES cart slots from Nintento till like 2003 or something. Might just be a hoax though.

>>2775774
actually, the capability for expansion chips was built into both cart and console, just never utilized (probably because devs realized that expansion chips were way too expensive to realize a profit on a game)

i love when you guys start talking out your ass like you actually know a thing about computer architecture. nintencukcs.

>>2775815
I love when faggots shitpost like this. It makes me feel wise beyond my 13 years..

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>>2775815
>nintencukcs
this filter really shows underage easily

>>2775539
It would be cheaper.

>>2775790
I know the Expansion Pak and DiskDrive might fall on this category and I also remember this issue being discussed (and that SS/PSX/N64 chart pointing that out). Someone mentioned how N64 couldn't access data the same way SNES did, so it looked like there were some restrictions that weren't obvious at first glance. But I didn't knew they actually planned for expansion chips like that both into cart and console.

Although some developers were reportedly pulling their hair trying to make the most out of Nintendo's default microcode (the exception being Factor 5 "using the cartridge almost like normal RAM", I wonder how much different games that actually explored the benefits of cartridges would have been, such as Rare titles or Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. They'd probably either have lots of checkpoints to load the later sections of levels or ditch the dynamic tunes like in Ocarina of Time and Conker's BFD

>>2772529
Cartridges were the reason why N64 textures were so tiny and low-resolution, and then becoming hideously blurry as a result of them being stretched into oblivion with filtering, you fucking idiot. CDs would have allowed for much bigger, much higher-quality textures with much more detail, like PS1 and Saturn games, only without polygon-shaking and texture-warping in the PS1's case, or severe pop-in and flickering in the Saturn's case. CDs would also allow CD-quality audio and room for voice-acting, and high-quality FMV.

>>2775861
At this point, I can't even tell if this is ironic.

>>2775762
mini-disc?

>>2776492
Nope
Next guess?
It really is hard to find if you don't already know.

>>2776189
>Cartridges were the reason why N64 textures were so tiny and low-resolution
Not really, that was probably more due to the N64's extremely sparse memory architecture more than anything, and the difficulties of using it. It was that way because Nintendo tried to improve their profit margins on consoles sales.

Adding a disk drive would just have added another $100 to the price. Either the consumer would have to pay, or Nintendo would have had to gimp the N64 in some far more drastic way.

They were not interested in doing loss leader strategies like Sony.

>>2776558

>They were not interested in doing loss leader strategies like Sony.

Someone really really should have set them down when they made this attitude apparent and just bluntly told them "Tough shit.".

Whether they were "interested" in it or not, when the entire market shifts you get with the program or get steamrolled.

>>2776590
If your product is in high enough demand, then you don't need to loss lead. Apple are probably the most famous example of a company that doesn't loss lead, and probably has never done it. Nintendo didn't loss lead with the Wii and DS, which is why they made such a ridiculous amount of money on those consoles (in 2009, Nintendo were the most profitable company per person employed in the world).

Then again, Nintendo were very briefly doing a small loss lead with the Wii U around launch time and that didn't help the console at all.

That being said, I reckon an N64 with a disk drive could have been such an appealing product that they might have been able to get away with selling it for an extra $100 without loss leading. A little known fact is that the N64 motherboard actually costs less to produce than the PS1 motherboard even when excluding the disk system.

>>2776513

pocket cd newfriend

>>2776608
>Then again, Nintendo were very briefly doing a small loss lead with the Wii U around launch time and that didn't help the console at all.

If I remember correctly it's still making losses. Besides they are helping the console. But Nintendo since Iwata is shit. I don't hate him, but he steerd Nintendo in completely different derection.

>>2776626
>>2776513

>Mini CDs, or "pocket CDs",

>>2776640

I plain have not liked Nintendo since the GC era.

Though the DS is kinda-sorta OK. :/

>>2772356
People forget that N64 having less games was more because Sony was subsidizing development for third parties and giving them a larger cut of the revenue. THAT'S why every dev ignored Nintendo, not because of cartridges.

>>2776647

Not to mention the god-tier tech support. Nintendo by contrast wouldn't even share their tech docs half the time. It's pretty bad when Rare just decides to muddle through on their own with microcode development rather than waste more time with Nintendo dragging their asses.

ITT: people who pretend to have been devs in the 90s

>>2776661

Where has anybody claimed that?

>>2776647
>giving them a larger cut of the revenue
That bigger cut you're talking about mostly came out of the smaller production costs for CDs. I agree on the other point though.

>>2776653
>Rare just decides to muddle through on their own with microcode development
The only reason Rare were able to do that is precisely because Nintendo gave them microcode documentation (albeit, partly untranslated). Nintendo refused to share it with companies that didn't pledge exclusivity though.

>>2776684

>The only reason Rare were able to do that is precisely because Nintendo gave them microcode documentation (albeit, partly untranslated). Nintendo refused to share it with companies that didn't pledge exclusivity though.

Not what one of their former devs says.... :/

>>2776689

:/

>>2776689
I'd like to see a source for this. Pretty sure they got the microcode source code with Japanese comments + some very basic English documentation about how the microcode functions.

>>2776647
>>2776653
That, and Playstation being very easy to develop for, according to some developers (Cory Bloyd, I believe?), except there was effectively no debugger,

>>2776661
Please leave.