This claim really doesn't add up. FDS game loads are like five seconds. For many smaller (one side of the disk) games the entire game loaded in a single go.
Because they don't have as much data to transfer? I've seen some really awful load times, + side flipping, but that could be due to belt age. In any case, it's still (a) worse than cartridge and (b) requires adjusting the design to handle loading, as you would go on to say. It's not like Nintendo had no idea how to handle loading in games - they had been training for it already. As bad as piracy was I imagine they would have stuck with FDS overseas, but luckily manufacturing cost for cartridges came down enough that even games as big as Wario's Woods were possible. It's actually ironic that even Nintendo wanted out of the cartridge cost portfolio, but ended up sticking with it the longest.
Hmm. Isn't saying that the N64 was underpowered pretty unfair? I mean, it was a $200 home console. They were limited by the price, and despite that the N64 was more powerful than home PCs at the time of its release. Later that year PCs did pass the n64, though, when the Voodoo 1 card released... for more money than an N64 cost, as a graphics-only addon card. Sure, there was some pushback against the N64 when we first saw it -- I mean, it did not live up to the "it'll look like arcade Cruis'n USA but at home!" hype -- but considering the price it was as powerful as it could be. I'm sure there are some ways that SGI's lacking experience at the consumer level hurt, but it did still end up being pretty powerful, and the most powerful system of the generation.
It's a matter of perspective. To you or me, sure, a 90+ MHz console in the era of the SNES and whatever is amazing. Superfast. But what they were promised by SGI was effectively a $40 Onyx with vastly improved power consumption, and the reality is that [a] it wasn't ready (hence the console delays), the spec came down a lot, and [c] some of the hardware was just not really a good idea for the home. Specifically, the texture cache being too small, and the choice of Rambus DRAM (which had extraordinary transfer rate but just abysmal latency). It's kind of a "Popeye" console in that the arms are massive but the torso and legs need some work. Hooking up a CD would have solved the storage problem (adding beefier legs), but without a cache to handle the textures, or massively improved DRAM latency, the N64 CPU was often stuck waiting (not doing anything!) and wasting its effective clockspeed on transfers.
The cartridge was effectively vital for some games because, for example, if you just play the music off the cartridge, you end up using that spare CPU time to get the audio going...but the downside is that you need it basically uncompressed because if you were to decompress it, you would have to decompress to RAM...which means copying it there...and the whole rigamarole continues.
To make things worse, Nintendo legally protected stuff about how Project Reality worked (opcodes) and you had to actually apply to Nintendo to learn some of it. It's not like X86 where the whole architecture is there for you - certain aspects of reaching the same speeds as Nintendo were effectively subject to a disclosure.
A Black Falcon said:
What do you mean here? If the N64 used CDs with no other changes, you'd still have a system with a 3x faster CPU and a whole pile of nice graphical features like perspective correction, etc. I presume that you're just talking about textures, though, and in that case, yes; I agree, just adding a CD drive to the N64 would not fix the systems' texture resolution problem, they'd still be lower-rez than PS1 textures are. You'd need a larger cache for that.
Nintendo was absolutely correct with the Gamecube in that you need the right balance of hardware components to actually use them to their potential. The N64 CPU was often stalled by choices on cache and RAM, just as the PS1 was stalled by transfer speed. But Nintendo's error was more difficult to swallow because basically it took the lead it had in some components (like clockspeed) and probably left it on par, above, or below the PS1 depending on what you need. Perspective Correction is great! But I don't think Front Mission 3 or Rage Racer were substantially without it. Especially because they could make up for it with sheer data size or textures everywhere (see: Ridge Racer 64 vs. RRT4). Now, a lot of this stuff, if you're clever, you can design and code around. You can find interesting ways to cover up the problems. But at that point, you're basically working as hard if not harder as the guys on CD.
Sega realized this mistake with the Sega CD and ended up including cache memory and a co-processor, realizing that if they asked the Megadrive to do the work, it would not only be slower...but it would also reduce the amount of capability/performance available to games. So basically, CD was the right way to go, but you wanted the right hardware to speed it up a little, if you still wanted to save your core performance for games.
A Black Falcon said:
What do you mean? The N64 has 4MB of RAM... or 8MB with the RAM expansion. Unless you meant to say 'what if it shipped with 8MB of RAM'? In that case, that would have been interesting, sure... though as we see with games that support the Expansion Pak, it helped a lot for some things, but also allowed devs to push resolutions to a point where the framerates got even worse in N64 games, so it's probably not all bad that not all N64 games support it... it'd still have been really cool though, yeah. Were they ever actually thinking about putting 8MB in the base system?
I mean, at the time, RAM was always one of the most expensive things in a computer. It was getting cheaper, but slowly. It took the widespread success of Windows 95 and the Internet to boost adoption rates, trigger new factories, and eventually get die size down enough where memory cost could plummet. Given the 5+ year lifecycle of consoles, Nintendo and Sony often didn't look just at how much their console cost prior to launch, but at how much they could forecast it dropping down. That affected how quickly they could get down to the "magic" $99 and just basically make more profit in the interim.
The trick is that you're making that bet 5+ years in advance. If Sony or Nintendo (or Sega) knew their RAM cost would go down so much, they would ship it with more. More cache, more RAM, whatever it takes to make development easier and improve performance. Suddenly you have the PS4 situation of the best console to work with. The RAM expansion was Nintendo's hedge: they didn't think RDRAM would drop so quickly (and since it was not common DRAM, it probably didn't) but if Sony had 4 or 8 on launch, well, you could store a lot more on load. You could stream data longer. Bigger levels, more textures on call, etc. N64 had a level geometry advantage in that you could load more, and faster, but to realize the speed gain you would need compression...which in turn has CPU and memory latency cost. Generally the N64 lesson was: big levels: OK, but you would end up smearing them with such small textures that it was a difficult balancing act. Going down to 256color or 16 color helped a lot with texture size, but...yeah not the easiest to work with.
So really I just mean "shipped with" because that's ultimately the only hardware spec that matters. Nintendo did ship the expansion, but the install base was already low, and this made it even lower. Shipping consoles is a hedge on a specific platform spec and hoping your software doesn't outgrow it before you plan on the next one.
