This mini forum is intended to provide a simple means of discussion about the Nintendo Nintendo 64 videogame system. If you want to share your own experience or memories, or add relevant information about this system: post a message!

Named for its 64-bit central processing unit, it was released in June 1996 in Japan, September 1996 in North America, and March 1997 in Europe and Australia. It was the last major home console to use the ROM cartridge as its primary storage format until the Switch in 2017.$9$ The Nintendo 64 was discontinued in 2002 following the launch of its successor, the GameCube.

The description here is very biased and makes it sound as though the N64 was a complete flop. Actually it was very popular, selling almost 33 million units and had a game library of almost 400 games.
The durability and speed of carts and the fact that with the speed of the N64''s cpu you could compress well over 64 megs of data to a cart made it far from a failure.

This is a great site, but a terrible description. Also btw what the heck is up with the first paragraph about the name change? They changed the name, so what, and you could later get ports of those games for the N64. Get someone less biased to rewrite this description. (and keep up the otherwise fantastic work)

there were games on the n64 that used fmv low quality though and not very many did i think maybe three of them did

The N64 was a strange combination of good and bad hardware. In raw performance terms it was superior to the PlayStation. They Both used MIPS based processors but the PlayStation used a MIPS I design whereas the N64 used a more modern MIPS III based cpu which ran at 93Mhz, much higher than the PlayStation''s 33Mhz.

The N64 also had a gpu developed by SGI which was very impressive at the time. SGI was the leader in 3D hardware and software in the 1990''s and their workstations cost tens of thousands of dollars. It was unheard of to have SGI technology in something as low end as a home console. The RCP (Reality Co-Processor) had two major design flaws though. It lacked DMA capability and it had a tiny texture cache which was almost useless for the 3D games the N64 was intended for. It''s why most N64 titles have minimal to know texturing and instead use Gouraud Shading like Mario 64.

The N64 also had very fast RDRAM which is much quicker than conventional SDRAM but is very expensive. The architecture also did not include unified memory and paired with the RCP''s lack of DMA meant in practice there was high memory latency in-spite of the high bandwidth and it thrashed the ram. RDRAM would briefly see PC use in the first generation Pentium 4''s but was soon replaced with DDR SDRAM because it was much cheaper and was an industry standard and not tied to one company (RAMBUS have become patent trolls).

The N64''s cartridges were a blessing and a curse at the same time. Everyone remember''s the Sony adverts where they compared one CD-ROM to a large pile of N64 carts showing the difference, and this was true, if a bit exaggerated, and the N64 suffered especially in the sound department because of it. Which PlayStation games had CD-quality audio and even some used FMVs the N64 lacked both. The cartrdige did save it in other aspects though. The ROM''s were much faster than a CD-ROM and were used to effectively stream game content on and off the machine to make up for the memory latency and puny texture cache. That coupled with custom microcode developed later by several determined development studios helped saved the N64''s hamstrung hardware and even gave some impressive results at the end of it''s life.

The N64 was in theory a more powerful machine but was limited by a wtf architecture and very difficult programming. The PlayStation on the other hand while using inferior hardware had a much better thought out design and was able of actually doing the things it was theoretically supposed to. Sony also has the advantage of being a massive zaibatsu so it was able to pull resources and experts from many different fields and departments to make a well thought out and polished package that also doubled as a high quality CD Player.

The hardware and processing power for the Nintendo 64 was vastly superior to that of the Sony Playstaion..The one thing holding the N64''s full capabilities back was the maximum 64 Megabytes (512 Megabits) being used in a cartridge...
The audio processor could easily output DVD quality audio but due to the limited cartridge size, they had to down sample the audio...

The system used 4 megabytes of ram without the expansion pack and 8 megabytes with the expansion pack....the texture size limit only pertained to the individual vertices used in 3D polygons...so one had to put things together like a mosaic to make them work....tedious.

One major advantage over the Playstaion was that the N64 used antialiasing and a z-buffer to prevent texture popping that the Playstaion often produced....and it allowed basic dynamic lighting to be used.

Regardless, it is one of the greatest consoles of all time...

something i find incredibly interesting, is that now, with every system using discs, and people complaining about loading screens, no one seems to remember that cartridge systems NEVER have loading screens. There is nothing TO load. All the loading is done when you put a cartridge in it. N64 $ greatest system ever. **** off playstation. i never liked you and never will

something i find incredibly interesting, is that now, with every system using discs, and people complaining about loading screens, no one seems to remember that cartridge systems NEVER have loading screens. There is nothing TO load. All the loading is done when you put a cartridge in it. N64 $ greatest system ever. **** off playstation. i never liked you and never will

My best freind lil bro had one. OCARINA OF TIME FOR EVAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!! Sorry...

I can see by reading the system''s description that the owners of this site were biased towards Sony by explaining in the most polite way that the system was crap and CD is better.


Freaking hypocrites. :P

i have one it still works fine you could buy lots of stuff for it there were games that you could use a microphone for rumble paks and memory cards.

The most popular N64DD game was the original Animal crossing.

this game originally cost $199.01, plus it has 2 special packs called "basic pac" and "jumper pac"