How might gaming history have been different if the N64

>>3806861
The N64 would have had FMV like the playstation, but games like Perfect Dark or Conker's BFD would have been impossible, because CD's have terrible bandwidth compared to carts.

>>3806987
you just need a big enough buffer to hold all the data. lets pretend they give it a bunch more ram so it can do it.

I imagine the greatest difference is the Saturn's complete and utter destruction in Japan, and that many Satun/PS1 "exclusives" would have also received N64 ports.

The console would have cost $100 more though.

File: Nintendo_Play_Station_prototype.jpg (12KB, 220x275px) Image search: [Google]

12KB, 220x275px

>>3806861
super disc

>>3806993
let's actually just pretend the N64 was a PS4 and call it a day

>>3807013
Sure, why not, its just as realistic as OP's idea.

>>3806993
The expansion pak sold for $50, and that was just 4mb or RAM.

The kind of memory you're talking about would easily push the N64 into the 3DO price range.

>>3807052
The Expansion Pak was enormously marked up. 4 MB of RDRAM even in 1996 would have cost $10 at most, probably less in bulk and the fact that Rambus signed a special discount contract with SGI.

>>3806993
>Nintendo
>not cutting costs whenever possible
not likely, pal

>>3806861
extremely different. it would have probably won the gen as it had the brand recognition. n64 lost because cartridges were too expensive and developing for them was costly and sucked, too.

>>3807079
If it wasn't for Nintendo's cost cutting...I will fix the N64 and not make it too expensive.

CD-ROM drive, with 1 MB DRAM load cache, 8-bit bus, 62.5 MB/s.
8 MB of RDRAM, two dedicated channels of 4 MB each to CPU and RCP respectively, 562.5 MB/s per channel, for a total of 1.125 GB/s bandwidth.

Nintendo literally could have done this, and the console would have been almost perfect and still cheaper to manufacture than Saturn.

>>3807095
Actually I'm wrong, the DRAM would likely be 31.25 MB/s in that situation. Still, that's plenty fast for a load-cache.

Hell, the Gamecube's load cache was like 81 MB/s.

>>3806861
Not much. Yamauchi-era Nintendo would still be charging stupidly high licensing fees to third parties.

>>3806861
If they made it possible to add a 12 to 32 meg ram expansion cart, it would have grown into a behemoth of a console eventually.

An optional cartridge slot would also have sufficed, expansion packs could have been done with replacement CDs.

If nintendo instead had been partnering with sony and had the N64 use minidiscs together with carts, that would have been best ... if there was no playstation, at least until a year after the N64md was released.

File: IMG_3699.png (393KB, 1440x1080px) Image search: [Google]

393KB, 1440x1080px

More loading and games would look like this

>>3807116
Why wouldn't the N64 have texture filtering if it used CD-ROM?

>>3807136
thats a good question.
SGI may of been willing to sacrifice performence, but not image quality.

>>3807116
>>3807136
>>3807159
Texture filtering has nothing to do with cartridges.

Also, bilinear texture filtering is "free" on the N64. Enabling it has a virtually indistinguishable effect on performance.

It would be a 1X or 2X CD drive (150 or 300 KB/s max speed), not modern CD drives, and that would still be much more expensive, complicated, and fragile than a cartridge slot. Cartridges are tens to hundreds of times faster than that. The console would probably need a BIOS in case they change drive hardware in the future. Cartridges also have no seek times.

If you went with CDs, you would also need memory cards, which increase the price again. You might be able to use the Controller Pak, but then games that let you save (almost all of them) won't be able to use rumble or other features.

Cartridges also get faster and bigger as time goes on, and can carry extra hardware. The N64 cartridge bus is 264 MB/s, but the fastest cartridge used in the N64 was 50 MB/s.

As far as games go, it wouldn't be able to have the constant real-time loading of new data. Pretty much every N64 game loads animations, textures, code, and other data on the fly from the cartridge as needed. This is why crooked cartridge causes so much corruption but you can sometimes take out a PS1 CD while playing and nothing happens. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask actually load new areas within the same room almost instantly, while keeping Link's animations and movement intact.

It wouldn't just be longer load times, it would be the complete inability to do the real-time animations and world loading we see in most N64 games.

>>3807795
you needed memory paks anyway for some games. fucking gauntlet ass legends

>>3806861
I use CDROMs with my N64. Have done for decades.

>>3806996
>$100 more
No, it would have cost much more. You need the drive and a lot more ram.

>>3807069
>$10 at most
Your age is showing sport. Quantity price for ram when the N64 entered production would have been several times that.

>>3807095
>I will fix
>still uses rambus
Fail

>>3808595
>I use CDROMs with my N64
You poor thing

>>3806861
Still gets destroyed by Playstation. Ease of development was their biggest advantage.

>>3807052
>The expansion pak sold for $50

no it didn't.. it was like $30, and you could get it with DK 64 for $70

>>3807069
Rambus Ram was around ten times as expensive as normal ram in 1998. 4MB probably would have cost you at least a hundred bucks if not more, then there was the expense of buying a board that supported it since rdram was proprietary.

This shit was great because of low latency compared to regular ram but those fuckers at rambus were crooks. They went to a JEDEC conference and sat in the back of the room and wrote down pretty much everyone's ideas on making a new ram standard, then they went out and got a patent on exactly that. And then tried to fucking sue the entire ram industry for copyright infringement.

>>3808595
>a lot more ram.
You need no more than an extra 1MB of cheap DRAM for disk caching. For reference, the PS1 has 128KB. I'm assuming here that Nintendo are more interested in improving load times than the competition.

>Quantity price for ram when the N64 entered production would have been several times that.
Maybe. I'll revise that. $20 for 4MB at most in bulk. RAM prices actually went up after the N64 came out due to the Taiwan earthquakes in 1998 and 1999.

>Fail
RAMBUS was by far the best value RAM at the time due to its extremely low integration costs (18 bit vs 64 bit). It sucked more on PC because software on that platform receives less optimization in general.

>>3808953
>Rambus Ram was around ten times as expensive as normal ram in 1998
Rambus wasn't even commercially available in 1998. It was only sold in wholesale quantities to large manufacturers like Nintendo. It became ridiculously expensive for PC not due to the actual manufacturing cost, but due to Rambus' greed due to being promised a market monopoly by Intel (and also, the lack of bulk manufacturing since barely anybody bought an early P4).

>4MB probably would have cost you at least a hundred bucks if not more
Certainly not in 1996. Nintendo made an absolutely KILLER profit on selling N64 hardware, and that was selling it at $199. If the RAM alone cost over $100 then they would have made nothing. Also, if you meant in 1998, that would suggest that Nintendo sold the Expansion Pak at a loss. Completely idiotic.

>then there was the expense of buying a board that supported it since rdram was proprietary
Meaningless in the context of a console.

>This shit was great because of low latency
It's the opposite. Rambus' advantage is the high bandwidth but also high random-access latency

>those fuckers at rambus were crooks
I won't disagree with this. It's completely true. But you shouldn't use the prices Rambus used on the PC market to gauge the price they offered to Nintendo or Sony.

>>3809064
Sorry champ but you're wrong on all counts.

An extra 1MB of ram isn't enough. Nintendo says at least 4 even without "disk caching"

You're full of shit on RAM prices. I was buying thousands of MBs a month at the time. What were you doing that got you such a better price?

>>3809064
The expansion pak bundled with DK64 was sold at a loss.

>>3810432
You don't need more than a 1MB of RAM for disk caching for this generation of machines. Nintendo have never commented on this scenario so you can't defer to that authority.

>I was buying
You were a consumer, paying consumer level single unit prices from shops that also acted as the middleman and took a cut. I doubt you were buying modules as small as 4MB anyway.

>>3810748
Sold at a loss to Rare, not Nintendo. They were forced to buy them from Nintendo for the bundle.

>>3806993
>let's pretend it was a way better system!

>>3806861
I don't think a lot would change. One of the big factors into why a lot of companies that were mainly on Nintendo systems switched to Playstation was out of spite over their really restrictive policies.

>>3810976
Top kek kid. Nintendo shipped the DD with a 4MB RAM pak for a reason sport.

>>3810976
>You were a consumer
Project harder kiddo. I bought and sold thousands <1MB SIMMs before you were born.

>>3811198
>Nintendo shipped the DD with a 4MB RAM pak for a reason sport.
Yeah, and disk caching was a very small part of that reason.

>I bought and sold thousands <1MB SIMMs before you were born.
That's nice. Nintendo would have signed an agreement with Rambus for at least 10 million modules.

>>3811226
That's nice. You pulled a number out of your ass and can't back it up. kek

Nintendo PlayStation

>>3812461
Have you read Game Over by David Sheff? It's quoted in there that Nintendo signed a contract for several million memory components back when the original Famicom was just getting started, and was no certain success, just to save a shitload of money per component.

You can bet that they took that up to 11 with the SNES and N64.

>>3813304
So still nothing to support your bullshit numbers. Cool story kid.

>>3813379
>hurrr nintendo must have stopped doing it after the NES

>>3813397
So still nothing to support your made up numbers? Maybe a few more shitposts will make you feel better about your failure.