The Nintendo 64 Environment was TERRIBLE for Game Development

[@BubblegumCrash332]

This is the best description of the N64 architecture in KZbin. It's very technical but I'm not a programmer or engineer and it all makes perfect sense to me. Thank you you have a gift explaining these things I hope you keep this series going.

[@ZygalStudios]

Makes me happy to see this. Thanks for the feedback. :) I have a PS3 one I did last month, and a Sega Saturn and Atari Jaguar are coming soon!

[@dr.tartaryempireesquired.o932]

@@ZygalStudios why cant i comment

[@masonbogue538]

Imagine if they had just a few more megabytes of texture cache

[@ZygalStudios]

Would have definitely been interesting for sure!

[@maroon9273]

Also, shared their microcode to 3rd parties.

[@oliverb.8995]

@@ZygalStudios The texture cache wasnt much important - it was how textures were mapped and used. PS1 actually had 2 kb textures and the games looked AMAZING. PS1 used a type of mapping that took full use of the cache and made the textures good but N64 used a different type of mapping that was extremely limited.

[@oliverb.8995]

@@ZygalStudios also the N64 cache is explicitly loaded. Which in turn should mean that the Playstation cache is a true associative cache, while the N64 has either what could also be described as a scratchpad or a simple directly mapped cache.

[@MaxAbramson3]

The design was actually great for 500,000 flat shaded polygons (and I seem to recall reading that N64 could hit 800,000), but NINTENDO was heavy handed with developers, insisting that textures and all features be turned on, limiting their games to 180,000 (effectively about half of that), blurry textured polygons/sec. Worse, developers were not allowed to access microcode for improved performance, and the DMA was placed on the wrong side of the RCP, crippling the system bandwidth. Other problems are mentioned in the video. Basically, NINTENDO kept making the same mistake over and over again: waiting 5-7 years before releasing new hardware (which was always cheaper and weaker than rivals), and developers had to keep starting over from scratch with radically new hardware and unfinished software development tools. The result was the NINTENDO went from 97% dominant market leader to hovering around 10% consistently for about three decades now... and some people asking "Why are they even in the console market?"

[@NitrosS]

Rareware programers and Nintendo programers were gods... Imagine the developers of RE2 for N64.... Beyond godlike

[@ebookjapan8054]

Rockstar San Diego actually ported RE2 to N64 back when they were still Angel Studios

[@NitrosS]

@@ebookjapan8054 Yes I know Ricardo. They were such talented people.

[@jessehenrique4343]

Super nintendo and snes were too , the used assembly to make game i amd trying to understand till now how they did a game with fucking assembly

[@Oni64]

Shout out to Acclaim and Iguana

[@Ardkun00]

Only Rareware programmers. They devoloped TEN high quality games for the NES without knowing how to code for that console and presented them to Nintendo.

[@miguelroman4294]

Playing N64 RE2 on my old phone I always wondered why the sound slowed up when the FPS took a hit. Your breakdown explained to me why! Great video!

[@ZygalStudios]

Thank you! Glad you liked the video and it helped you realize why :) If you're interested, I've got hardware architecture breakdowns of 4 other consoles on my channel!

[@cossinle]

This video is underrated. Keep it up!

[@overwatch761]

Excellent video - the system was a real challenge, particularly with initial SGI microcode which according to Rare and other developers was completely useless for gaming. If the system was CD developers would've had a much easier time I feel, at least they wouldn't needed to have wasted so much time compressing and cutting assets to fit into smaller than expected cartridges. Games like San Francisco Rush 2049 show off the N64's processing grunt, huge 3D, high speed 3D environments but that wasn't until 4 years after launch and it was still only on a 12MB cart...Insane.

[@maroon9273]

Even a 250 and later a 750 GB zip like disk or a magnetic cd like the minidic could have been another alternative nintendo could have used as well.

[@dr.tartaryempireesquired.o932]

I have a bunch of old n64 development stuff. Silcon grapgics power animator sealed

[@crazedlunatic43]

It would've made the console much more pricey at launch and using optical media would allow them to store more content, albeit the architecture still would be complex to work on. Cartridges weren't the issue, rather the issue goes onto how the system was designed instead being the main cause.

[@luvair6765]

Excellent video. I cant imagine the brilliance that went into developing any game on the N64. Amazing.

[@jh5124]

I sat through the commercials so you could maybe get a shilling or two for your work.

[@explanoit]

Thanks for the cool video. Wanted to hear more about the 4K texture limit

[@ZygalStudios]

Thank you! If you're interested in the texture cache, check out my "Why N64 Textures Were Stretched and Blurry" video! :) you can get some more insight with that.

[@Anthony-cn8ll]

N64 graphics are basically smeared in vaseline, namely VI-blur and Trilinear Filtering, to look smooth. The clock face in Majora's Mask is actually made of several textures so that it looks sharper.

[@Trevor6714]

So if I got this right, the reason the n64 was so limited was because you need to access different parts of the hardware that were placed in bad spots, and being in those spots cause slowdown because of how much distance info has to travel across the console?

[@ZygalStudios]

You have part of it! The placed in bad parts of the system is true, but it is less about distance and more about that the path to the final destination is limited in bandwidth. Best way I can think of describing it is a highway that's filled with traffic going 70 with 4 lanes and all of a sudden those 4 lanes merge into 2. Now you can only have half the lanes for traffic and it moves slower. If that makes sense :)

[@Trevor6714]

@@ZygalStudios yes it does thank you!

[@MaxAbramson3]

@@ZygalStudios Or four lanes plus an HOV lane narrowing down to two... with the occasional traffic accident.

[@RogeriusRex]

You gonna do a follow up video on the iQue player and the beefed up specs?

[@grengren6421]

Thanks for these types of vids. Really interesting.

[@vMUREKv]

great but cuts weirdly at 8:20

[@pukalo]

World Driver Championship is programmed so well for the N64 that its high graphics and solid 60 fps don't even need the expansion pak.

[@ZoonZac]

wow, ralphthemoviemaker is really into his n64 hardware.

[@unity6926]

Incredible breakdown dude. Sad I'm just seeing getting recommended your channel now. Thankfully 2020 was good for N64 homebrew, in no small part due to the you-know-what! Anyway, subbed.

[@ZygalStudios]

Thank you! Welcome!! :)

[@evanb4466]

Love your channel! Tons of great info!

[@twh563]

Wow! Great stuff!! I never had an N64 until last year when I bought the Toys R Us Gold edition a few years ago. I enjoy it a lot.

[@Jamie-yp7qz]

You just earned yourself a subscriber. Keep up the good work!

[@crazedlunatic43]

A long paragraph of what actually made the Nintendo 64 more complex than what many people often realize: People tend to blame cartridges for making development more challenging on devs, and although the limited capacity certainly had it's own drawbacks, the main issue wasn't because the choice in format chosen, but rather, how the system was designed. For example, if we take a look at the systems low texture cache, which only contained 4KB capacity, this mainly prevented devs from being able to create and add textures with higher resolution than we normally see on any N64 game. Using any features like the Z Buffer if I'm correct further decreases the available amount of texture cache down to 2KB, and in truth, 4KB of texture cache isn't enough to create high resolution textures, and is what caused textures to appear low resolution. Using CDs in a way wouldn't solve the texture cache issue as all it would do is allow more low resolution textures to be stored and it would be up to the developer to be crafty enough to make it work, and again, the fault mostly compounds towards the systems architecture, which also includes lackluster availability of texture cache. The Sony PlayStation for example has more texture cache to work with, and even if the PS1 didn't use CDs, the console's simple architecture and great development tools enable devs to somehow make PS1 games better than on the N64. Poor documentation of the hardware is what also held the console back.

[@maroon9273]

What is your thoughts on the expansion paks? Did it help the n64 texture issues?

[@crazedlunatic43]

@@maroon9273 The expansion pak was a neat addition to the Nintendo 64, it enabled us to play certain titles that would only work with the expansion pak enabled, such as Majora's Mask, Donkey Kong 64, and access to all of Perfect Dark's content. In some ways, it would boost texture quality if I'm correct, and other games would also see a boost of frame rates as well.

[@maroon9273]

@@crazedlunatic43 yes, and thanks for clarifying the texture cache.

[@crazedlunatic43]

@@maroon9273 Anytime. The idea that people would blame the use of cartridges for making a console more difficult to work with is quite false. As I have said earlier, they have their own disadvantages, but if cartridges really made development complex, then the Sega Saturn would've had no complaints for using CDs simply.

[@crazedlunatic43]

@@maroon9273 A fun fact by the way, have you ever wondered why Cloud's model in final fantasy 7 (or really any PlayStation one game.) looks more detailed in the cutscenes than when you resume controls? This is because full motion video isn't at all rendered by the hardware itself, but rather the system fetches data off of the disc for any pre existing clips that were rendered on more powerful hardware, and all devs could do was add the full motion video clip onto the disc as part of their game. The PS1 didn't need to put in the work of rendering the cutscenes when it could fetch data off of the disc. I brought this up because some people believe that the PS1 is more powerful than N64, when in truth it is not.

[@ulissesfm64]

Can program a new game today?

[@leaocfa.]

I have the same question,i want to make a unoficial remake of murasame castle -my english is bad

[@ghostindoomerville]

It is possible, but tricky. Get ready to spend extra time doing it. (Not saying this to scare you) A website I've found that has a bunch of links to get you started: n64.dev/ I might use it myself in the future.

[@lmk10000]

Look at the N64 Portal port some guy is developing. It's looking amazing.

[@myownfriend23]

For the past year or so I've been really curious what it would have been like if someone tried to make a game with pre-rendered backgrounds on the N64. If you did them the way Square did then they would have eaten up cartridge space like crazy but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about taking a second or two during transitioning between areas to have the N64 make the background. Some N64 games already had real time lighting and shadows for characters so imagine giving the system a second or two to render a pre-culled, pre-sorted +200,000 triangle background with shadow maps, super sampling, some slow form of bump mapping, etc. Once it's done, it could use the same lighting and subset of the geometry data just to light and obscure the characters that need to be placed in the environment each frame. That would take a fraction of the storage space (especially with compression) and still create some amazing visuals that could even be upscaled in emulators.

[@mystsnake]

it was well known back in its day, ocarina of time in hyrule town used pre-render scene, in fact the insides of the kokiri houses were too though they were 3d shape detected but anywhere there's a fixed camera is pre-rendered. the town at least it was said reason was that there was to many polygons, probably why there's 2 crowd masses too rather than separate chars. i seem to remember navi cast a small light too at times, as for shadows, the system lacked the power for real-time proper shadows - links bad shadow at least did grow and shrink in real time to the suns position. its very intensive for a system already struggling with some games, even on the pc it was much later to do properly. but go ahead rather than just wondering if you think you can do it :)

[@myownfriend23]

@@mystsnake Yes but the Castle Town's pre-[rendered backgrounds were just a still image broken into tiles. I'm suggesting actually rendering them on the system. There plenty of games that used stencil shadows for the characters on the N64 though and that's all I'm really suggesting for enhancing the effect of the character within in a pre-rendered background.

[@mystsnake]

@@myownfriend23 3d char on 2d background - well personally they never felt quite right to me, i mean like it does't feel like the char is part of scene. you would probably need to do your idea yourself cause the n64 homebrew scene has never seemed to be what the other scenes are. but if you can get it so the 2 parts are blending smoothly, like how 2d chars look like on 2d bg then i'd be interested to see it

[@myownfriend23]

@@mystsnake Yea, I noticed that even the N64 demo scene was never all that lively. I'd actually love to do it myself because I feel like it could be a cool learning experience but I just need to find the time to learn to how to program for the N64.

[@overwatch761]

@@mystsnake Conker's Bad Fur Day features real time shadows.

[@MrSamPhoenix]

Great video! But 500 megabits equals about 62.5 MegaBytes. I mention this because in the video you mention the bus speed. The N64 had over 500 Megabytes (4000 megabits) that could be moved around every sec (sometimes).

[@chanchanarthur8068]

I wonder if it would have been possible to set up a cartridge to have bank switching capabilities to increase the available ROM space. I know that such a technology existed at the time, but it may have been much more expensive. Perhaps if ROM chips were as cheap as they are today, it could have really changed the games that could have been possible.

[@frasermips]

The N64 can access up to a 240 MB Cartridge, the problem was the cost of memory chips. Although to be fair not many games used the 64 MB that was available. Many games were as small as 4 MB and favorites like Super Mario 64 were only 8 MB. The N64 Zelda games were only 32 MB.

[@fungo6631]

@@frasermips Well, many PS1 games were also much smaller when you took out the redbook CD audio.

[@FoolishFlock]

i may be wrong but! Wasn't? the GameCube! also kinda a bit of a hassle to work on/with for Developer's too!?

[@pigmentedaf6676]

From what I've heard it was a bit more difficult to develop on compared to let's say the Xbox, But was way easier then the ps2, but that's just my own research

[@FoolishFlock]

@@pigmentedaf6676 oh!! okay!! Coolz!!! THANKS!!!!! For the information!!! man!!... And!? The!! PS2! Was!!?? a Difficult!? or Hard!? Console!? to Develop! Game's! For?!?... i mean! i think was aware! & can almost recall! from long ago!! that in like the VERY! Beginning!! like the first few couple Months!! or like maybe the First initial Year! or-so!! That! there! some Video-Game! Companies! & Developers! found a couple! of! obstacles! & few! issue's! & a-little-bit of difficulty! making! & developing! New! Game's! for!! & to! run!! on! the! PS2!!!... & back when SONY had & was using those! pretty! shortly! lived! Game-Disc's!! with! the! weird! Shiny BLUE Colored Underside's!!! & That some of the earlier Batches! of! PS2-Console's!!! had problems & defects such as They! Weren't!!! Reading!! the! early! PS2-Game-Disc's! that! had! the! Shiny BLUE Colored Underside's!! to them!! & even Weren't!! Reading! or Recognizing! some of the PS1 library of Game-Disc's! that were ALL! Supposed!! to-be!! Fully!! Backwards-Compatible!! with the PS2 Console's!!!... BUT!!! Like! Other!! than those- one! or two! small! things! & issues! i just! mentioned! above! i really never! quite! heard! much! of! anything! else! stating!/saying! or! really! pointing! towards! the PS2! being!! difficult!! to Develop!! & Make!! Video-Game's!! For!! or! whatever!!..... idk i could be totally wrong! & just! uninformed! on how the PS2 was to Make!! & Develop!! Video-Game's! & Etc.!! ON!!....

[@lmk10000]

Not at all. Nintendo learned from every mistake made with the N64 and worked out to fixed it with the Gamecube. It doesn't have any of the bottlenecks the N64 had. Maybe a little short on RAM but not that much.

[@FoolishFlock]

@@lmk10000 oh ok coolz thanks for the info the GameCube(& N64) both have a very special sentimental spot deep in my heart!!... ✌😉👍

[@SianaGearz]

Huh? The design of N64 actually makes sense. I mean i don't necessarily like it, but it still makes sense. Because if you've got RDRAM, and you're pressed for cost, it's going to have to be a unified memory system, because interfacing to RDRAM is unwieldy and expensive, and once you have that one interface, you just snake it through all the memory chips, that's just how it is. And then of course you will need most of that bandwidth dedicated to the GPU and the audio subsystem, because you want consistent performance out of it. The CPU is going to get leftovers, and if it has to stall to get them, so be it. Maybe it'll get some extra cache to make it less bad. 7:38 Am... eye dee aye? MIDI? It's pronounced like a word. Tripped me up somewhat fierce. Also MP3? NO, JUST NO. 8-bit audio? I didn't think it was even supported. Standard sample format on the system is 4-bit ADPCM, which effectively decompresses to 16-bit PCM on the fly. Compared to 4-bit ADPCM, 8-bit samples basically never make sense, the S/N is much worse but the space consumption is double. I think ADPCM samples sound pretty nice, and to the extent that they come out rough, that's just due to having to keep them very short, and mediocre abilities of the sample editing software of the day to fix loop point alignment issues. However i have always wondered, since i heard that the RSP does edge interpolation and issues span draws to RDP - not sure where and whether true - but span draw texture sampling is fundamentally eerily similar to audio resampling, so i was wondering whether there's hardware shared between these functionalities. But nothing you mention is anywhere near egregious, that's all pretty much par for the course. What i heard was egregious, was that the SDK didn't have source level debugging available for C, just for assembler. So trying to find a nontrivial bug in a complex, large software written in C... you can do it, but it'll take a lot of extra effort.

[@sameash3153]

Blows marijuana smoke on screen

[@ZygalStudios]

😂 😂

[@ChinacatSunflower0]

It would be great if you followed up with another video on N64.

[@leonokoura800]

Very nice video and well explained

[@redseagaming7832]

I'm going to say this the Nintendo 64 was Nintendo's PS3 hard to develop for because of its cartridge limitation

[@Mcdonaldsslopper]

The n64 was genuinely the most powerful console while the ps3 wasnt.

[@maroon9273]

@@Mcdonaldsslopper depending what your trying to do with the ps3. Ps3 was similar to the snes while the xbox 360 has similarities to the genesis.

[@richieb74]

I didn’t understand why they needed a texture cache. Why couldn’t they just use ram or run straight from the cart. But understanding the hardware. The latency was so high with rdram that they needed a place on the die just to store textures. And then they made it criminally small. What were they thinking

[@ZygalStudios]

Back at that time, RAM at that size was pretty expensive to manufacture and the in terms of the cart, the PIF bus was pretty slow. The choice to use a RAM bus design basically forced them to have hardware shortcuts that made the design overall cheaper. However, the 4kB texture cache size constraint did allow for new methods and styles of games to appear and also techniques of programming that still are alive to this day. It's a give and take type of situation. Fascinating nonetheless.

[@maroon9273]

@@ZygalStudios maybe they could've added the cache ram into the expansion pak.

[@amberdean1263]

AWESOME video. Thank you!

[@bunta_wrx5851]

somehow the ps2 architecture looks familiar

[@ZygalStudios]

To a degree. It did have a MIPS processor in it, but the graphics architecture was a bit different.

[@thiagopinheiromusic]

Please re-make Mortal Kombat II (this time w blood)

[@kayceecheshall2818]

The N64 audio sucked because it used up RSP processing capacity. No standalone processor.

[@syncmonism]

and also because of the limited ROM capacity (alternatively, you could say because of the high cost of making higher capacity cartridges)

[@fungo6631]

The PS1 GPU has a 1KB texture cache.

[@crazedlunatic43]

Key words: Poor documentation and lackluster amount of Texture cache are the sole reasons why development was complicated.

[@maroon9273]

Also, not sharing its codes to 3rd parties.

[@crazedlunatic43]

@@maroon9273 Explains why many third party releases don't look as good as the first party releases. It was a neat system, but had Nintendo provided third parties access to their codes, I believe the console would've truly shined.

[@maroon9273]

@@crazedlunatic43 and more games being developed especially arcade and pc games.

[@TheBic4]

Laughs in Atari Jaguar

[@MandrakeFernflower]

Could some of this been avoided if nintendo didn't use slow as balls RAMBUS?

[@ghostindoomerville]

I'm going to get lynched for saying this but Nintendo reminds me of Apple. Both companies want their products limited only to their platforms. Everything must be closed-sourced and provided by them strictly. Funny thing, the hardware used for the N64 was made by Silicon Graphics and MIPS. Which this company, (Silicon Graphics), made their own OS (IRIX OS) and their workstations were used to make Super Mario 64 simultaneously with LOZ:OOT. Meaning that Nintendo used hardware and software limited by a company that didn't have the wide support Intel, AMD, Microsoft, and Apple has. I could only imagine the nightmare devs had to put through while constantly debugging. It makes you question if other consoles were this nightmarish. RDRAM was commonly used as server memory back then and server memory is ECC vs the memory that's in your home computer that's Non-ECC. (If I made a mistake here, correct me by replying.)

[@lionfire3359]

Silicon graphics was the top innovators of computer tech back then. Intel and other companies got their ideas from them.

[@TheDeenactor]

How n64 development compares to the Sega Saturn

[@chis5050]

How does somebody even go about learning these things well enough to make a video? Without of course watching another video on the same topic lol

[@chis5050]

Great video btw

[@apollosungod2819]

Oh noes, Zygal really believes the Nintendo 64 enviroment was TERRIBLE for game development... oh teh noes.. to Zygal Studios, he really believes all game developers had the same skills and did the SAME effort at making Top Gun quality games... Wow like imagine that... Nintendo supplied the documentation tools but according to Zygal, game developers looked at the bandwith and hit their faces on their palms because they could not flex their programming skills... that explains why most of them went back to Sony PlayStation game development even though most of those games are not even remembered cause they could not hang with the top dawgs. Wow like Zygal believes that LAZY GAME DEVs was not a term in the 90s used by hardcore gamers who worked hard for their money and did not want to waste their money on shovelware... maybe Iguana Studios, Nintendo and old RARE were exceptions to this rule... maybe Angel Studios actually bothered to read AND study all the documentation tools Nintendo gave them.. maybe those games that turned out bad were bad because of the bandwith and TERRIBLE problem, not because those game devs were cutting corners or doing the SAME effort as a PS1 game so much that the game ended up looking and playing just like a PS1 game complete with load times on a ROM Cartridge... Later in the N64 life cycle the ROM Cartridges got bigger at 64MB aka 512 Megabit.. and somehow Angel Studios broke this kid's youtube video when they made TWO PS1 CD-ROM disc;s worth of data FIT inside one single N64 ROM Cartridge and used ancient NES and SUper NES techniques like compression of data and successfuly reprogram and convert Resident Evil 2 to N64... but that was only one game and one studio... unfortunately Iguana Games didn't match that cause they were too busy spreading themselves on PC even though their N64 games were selling multiple millions.. it is amazing how Iguana Games squandered their chances at making a 64MB ROM Cartridge game that required the 4MB RAM Pack... Old RARE was basically ready to do that but games require two years of development even if you are highly skilled and experienced on the same platform... Wow so Sega of America's management staff should have been given the data you promote so people like Bernie Stolar and other Sega of America managers would not be fearing a gigantic letter N just flattening them like pancakes that way they would have said... yeah bandwith, face palm and not bothered to make Sega Dreamcast... that would have been hilarious as by 2000 Microsoft would announce Xbox and you would have the last N64 retail games coming out in the year 2002 instead..

[@ozzieburt2350]

Awesome

[@Alcove_Dream]

k

[@vembrace]

You confirmed what most kids suspected at the time: the N64 was overhyped junk.

[@ZygalStudios]

I don't particularly agree with that statement. Pretty amazing piece of hardware considering the cost constraints. It just wasn't the most developer friendly system. It did spawn some of the best games in history and I certainly wouldn't call that overhyped junk, but that's just my opinion. Even from a graphics hardware standpoint, this hardware set the trend for 3D technologies moving into the mid 2010's, so it had a lasting impact and jammed about 100k of hardware from project reality into a $300 retail console

[@lmk10000]

This is totally not true at all. Should they have given one and a half more years to the sistem lifespan we would have had in the N64: Luigi's Mansion, RE Zero, Eternal Darkness, Dinosaur Planet, etc... All of those games were in development for the N64. Dinosaur Planet was over 96% or so completed. It was going to be even better than Conker BFD, which is ahead of everything you have seen in the PSX or Saturn.

[@kaitaylor9813]

No it wasn’t terrible for game development