8 ms·

Lack of CD-ROM was a gigantic problem, though. Doesn't matter if you have better hardware if you can't fit all the content. Square moved to PlayStation for spec

Lack of CD-ROM was a gigantic problem, though. Doesn't matter if you have better hardware if you can't fit all the content. Square moved to PlayStation for specifically this reason.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
It was a tradeoff. Cartridges cost a lot more but they made piracy a lot harder and loading times nonexistent. In retrospect it seems like a bad move but it could have gone the other way. Ironically, thanks to FPGAs we can now pirate cartridge games on the original hardware easily and without modification, while the situation with disc-based consoles is somewhat trickier. Meanwhile, physical console game distribution has swung back to solid-state media since optical discs simply can't match the capacity or speed.
danbolt 6y ago
I feel like the lack of CD-ROM dissuaded smaller-budget developers (eg: Moon, Vip Ribbon, etc.) and RPG makers like you mention, but I don't know if lacking a CD-ROM ultimately harmed the Nintendo 64's value proposition. The Resident Evil 2 port from Angel Studios was impressive reuse of the console's RSP, but I don't know if those sort of experiences were what Nintendo was going for or what it's audiences wanted anyway. I do think the PlayStation with it's CD-ROM drive did better with a broadening audience especially as the NES crowd grew older though.
derefr 6y ago
Where by “content” they meant “pre-rendered cutscene videos and wholly-PCM music tracks.” The idiomatic N64 approach to the same thing would have been to make the cutscenes with machinima; and to continue using short PCM audio samples for SFX and some instrument tracks in mostly-sequenced music, as was done in the latter half of the SNES's lifetime. (What about images, e.g. textures? Even if you had created a huge world with a lot of different “stuff” in it, the textures wouldn’t have been a capacity problem either... because the N64 just didn’t have the memory to hold or render very large/detailed textures. In its architecture, it was detailed [for the time] meshes that were cheap to load/render, not detailed textures. That, combined with hardware support for Gouraud shading and a few other algorithmic effects, made “basic blocks of color with a few flourishes, over a well-made mesh” the only practical approach to 3D modelling for the N64. Which meant that a world with many unique 3D models could actually be quite cheap to store in ROM, as "basic block of color" textures were inherently reusable, and meshes themselves compress very well.) Of course, this would never have worked for e.g. FF7, with its huge pre-rendered flat background scene textures; but imagine the FF7 we could have had on the N64. (The one that would look like the FF6 N64 demo, crossed with... Perfect Dark, maybe?)

Lack of CD-ROM was a gigantic problem, though. Doesn't matter if you have better hardware if you can't fit all the content. Square moved to PlayStation for specifically this reason.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

It was a tradeoff. Cartridges cost a lot more but they made piracy a lot harder and loading times nonexistent. In retrospect it seems like a bad move but it could have gone the other way. Ironically, thanks to FPGAs we can now pirate cartridge games on the original hardware easily and without modification, while the situation with disc-based consoles is somewhat trickier. Meanwhile, physical console game distribution has swung back to solid-state media since optical discs simply can't match the capacity or speed.

danbolt 6y ago

I feel like the lack of CD-ROM dissuaded smaller-budget developers (eg: Moon, Vip Ribbon, etc.) and RPG makers like you mention, but I don't know if lacking a CD-ROM ultimately harmed the Nintendo 64's value proposition. The Resident Evil 2 port from Angel Studios was impressive reuse of the console's RSP, but I don't know if those sort of experiences were what Nintendo was going for or what it's audiences wanted anyway. I do think the PlayStation with it's CD-ROM drive did better with a broadening audience especially as the NES crowd grew older though.

derefr 6y ago

Where by “content” they meant “pre-rendered cutscene videos and wholly-PCM music tracks.” The idiomatic N64 approach to the same thing would have been to make the cutscenes with machinima; and to continue using short PCM audio samples for SFX and some instrument tracks in mostly-sequenced music, as was done in the latter half of the SNES's lifetime. (What about images, e.g. textures? Even if you had created a huge world with a lot of different “stuff” in it, the textures wouldn’t have been a capacity problem either... because the N64 just didn’t have the memory to hold or render very large/detailed textures. In its architecture, it was detailed [for the time] meshes that were cheap to load/render, not detailed textures. That, combined with hardware support for Gouraud shading and a few other algorithmic effects, made “basic blocks of color with a few flourishes, over a well-made mesh” the only practical approach to 3D modelling for the N64. Which meant that a world with many unique 3D models could actually be quite cheap to store in ROM, as "basic block of color" textures were inherently reusable, and meshes themselves compress very well.) Of course, this would never have worked for e.g. FF7, with its huge pre-rendered flat background scene textures; but imagine the FF7 we could have had on the N64. (The one that would look like the FF6 N64 demo, crossed with... Perfect Dark, maybe?)