>The N64's architecture. The design philosophy of the N64 was to have a badass CPU/GPU and cheap out on everything else, resulting in a very constrained memory situation where fast data loading was a necessity and CDs would not have worked. The other options were to make a much more expensive console without compromises, or to make a less powerful console in line with the PS1/Saturn. Essentially, Nintendo was making a bet that the market would value a more powerful console with carts over a weaker console with CDs. >Loading times >Piracy (still possible with cart systems, and indeed happened with the N64, but cheaper and easier with discs) >The significance of CD storage wasn't yet apparent - until the mid 90s, many CD games were just cartridge games loaded up with music/FMVs, with crappy FMV gimmick titles being a cornerstone of the era >A desire to maintain the option for cartridge expandability - the NES and SNES were basically designed around the idea of having a cheap core system with cartridge expansions for games that needed it, and it worked out very well for them. >Spite against Sony and not wanting to pay royalties to them for their disc tech.
I personally think the first reason was the most significant. The N64 is closer to the Dreamcast and late 90s PC hardware than it is to the PS1/Saturn or really anything on the consumer market in the mid 90s, and by the time it was apparent that CDs wouldn't be an option, Nintendo was likely in deep with SGI (for all we know, the contract could've been signed before they realized) and had both a strong incentive to not back out and a conviction that they were making the right choice due to how powerful the console would end up being. They banked heavily on the 64DD too, figuring that the cartridge slot could be used for small games that benefited from quick loading times and that the 64DD would be their equivalent to CDs for larger, cheaper games.
>Essentially, Nintendo was making a bet that the market would value a more powerful console with carts over a weaker console with CDs.
I find this console generation fascinating, nobody knew how to handle 3D graphics or even CDs of even if the market could like them. The whole industry was experimenting and taking risks to see what works and what doesn't.
Yeah, only indie devs or very small developers are willing to do something new. It's sad because the industry is full of talented people but big corporations are only interested in making the next big live service game.
Don’t forget cost. Having a CD-ROM on it would add $100 at least to the price or they would take a loss on the console.
Also at the time all CD consoles were failures up to that point and didn’t have anything amazing done with them. Nintendo had every reason to believe the same would be the case with the N64 to the point of having it not be worth it.
In the earlier days of optical media it wasn't too uncommon to see discs come in plastic caddies that they would be inserted into the drive with, so the user never had to touch the actual disc.
the Sony-Nintendo contract was so screwed up that even Ken Kutaragi (the creator of the Playstation, PS2 and PS3) knew it was going to fail! so after that, who else to make a CD player for Nintendo? (I'm waiting for your answers)
>hardware designer and producer is responsible for licenscing software >this somehow means sony wanted to steal mario from nintendo
LMAO the whole spin tendies put on it is insane. These morons probably think sony and panasonic own ever printed CD ever lol.
I remember talking to one peddling the same bullshit, they said even sega was paying Sony for the CDs so I dug out several saturn and sega cd games to show him right on the disc it says manufactured by JVC. These people have no idea how this shit works.
There were many options, sanyo, victor, hitachi, nec, Philips, Nintendo just didn't want to flush away the massive revenue stream that was slapping macronix chips into a pcb
Nintendo had a monopoly in cartridge manufacturing where they demanded high amounts from developers ($20 per cart) so they wanted to keep cashing it on that sweet racket. They thought that after being the dominance force for two generations, companies would still accept their bullshit terms. Sony offered them cheap manufacturing costs on top of easy and inexpensive dev kits. Basically, they got too wienery and then repeated the mistake with another memeformat for the Game Cube. Greed drove them to become a minor player in the video game business until the Wii came along.
that's not totally true.
Nintendo royalties were $14.
that and the Seal of Quality happened because at first Nintendo didn't want third parties on the Famicom!!
Square, Hudson and Enix joined forces to lobby Nintendo for the right to develop on the Famicom.
Sega had their royalties at $13...
And Sony wanted $21 in royalties on the Snes-Play Station CDs, while yes, people felt that $14 was already a steal.
so after when Kutaragi took back the Playstation.
-he made a DevKit.
-more flexibility in the production and distribution of CDs (compared to cartridges)
-and only $7 royalties!
and for the Gamecube, Nintendo had aligned itself with the competition.
the Capcom games, MGS Twin Snake, it's because Satoru Iwata had lowered the royalties.
If third-party publishers fled Nintendo it was because they had to make more effort to adapt to a controller that was too different from the others and because their games sold poorly due to the omnipresence of Nintendo exclusives.
don't forget 1996 CD technology was not todays 52x ultra fast ultra reliable ordeal
it was 2x was extra fancy and CD readers breaking down randomly era
yes but hey some already had to supply Sega, Nec, 3D0 and SNK.
I'm not sure that at the time they could supply two competitors for reasons of contract or capacity to produce.
don't forget 1996 CD technology was not todays 52x ultra fast ultra reliable ordeal
it was 2x was extra fancy and CD readers breaking down randomly era
?si=NQE-duV-Seq1FZoo
and then the loading time was a big problem.
At first Yamaguchi was against CD because it was as long as the Neo Geo CD, it's really very long.
then Sony were the first to halve it using RAM, which convinced Yamauchi to switch to CD at Sony. (Loading like Neo-Geo CDZ)
but after the cancellation of the contract, they approached Philips...and the CD-i did not have as good a player as Sony.
have you seen the CD-i loading times?
do you have the loading times of the Zelda CD-i?
so what could Nintendo do?
looking for another CD player supplier at the risk of releasing the replacement for the Snes in 1998-99?
the PS1 CD-ROM is, at most, a 2x speed drive. That means a maximum sustained data transfer rate of 300 KB/sec, and that comes at a ~300 millisecond seek time just to begin to read data , it's slower , Mario 64 , Zelda not even Mario Kart would never work with this kind of mediium. That's why most PS1 games had flat level designs or divided in smaller chunks to begin with.
On a ROM cartridge ,specified at 5 to 50 MiB/s and ROM access times are on the nanosecond scale - several orders of magnitude faster, being perhaps 200ns for a read. That would be 0.0002 milliseconds. As a result, you can just easily set up a texture paging scheme, dynamically allocating textures when they're needed, and swapping them out extremely quickly when they aren't needed anymore. The ultra-fast access speed makes this virtually seamless, and you only really need a relatively small amount of RAM needed to store basically what's just currently in view and maybe a little bit extra for stuff you recently saw. Anything else can be freed up and re-allocated when some texture that's not currently in view is about to be drawn.
This is why FF VII models are gourad shaded , pre rendered backgrounds, 15 fps 3D battles to keep the animations fluid without having a shit ton of long loading times.
>perfect balance of power and beauty
kek, not with all those blurry, poorly textured games that ran at 20 fps
Nobody cared for fps back in the 90s.
Nintendo stuck with carts because:
>The N64's architecture. The design philosophy of the N64 was to have a badass CPU/GPU and cheap out on everything else, resulting in a very constrained memory situation where fast data loading was a necessity and CDs would not have worked. The other options were to make a much more expensive console without compromises, or to make a less powerful console in line with the PS1/Saturn. Essentially, Nintendo was making a bet that the market would value a more powerful console with carts over a weaker console with CDs.
>Loading times
>Piracy (still possible with cart systems, and indeed happened with the N64, but cheaper and easier with discs)
>The significance of CD storage wasn't yet apparent - until the mid 90s, many CD games were just cartridge games loaded up with music/FMVs, with crappy FMV gimmick titles being a cornerstone of the era
>A desire to maintain the option for cartridge expandability - the NES and SNES were basically designed around the idea of having a cheap core system with cartridge expansions for games that needed it, and it worked out very well for them.
>Spite against Sony and not wanting to pay royalties to them for their disc tech.
I personally think the first reason was the most significant. The N64 is closer to the Dreamcast and late 90s PC hardware than it is to the PS1/Saturn or really anything on the consumer market in the mid 90s, and by the time it was apparent that CDs wouldn't be an option, Nintendo was likely in deep with SGI (for all we know, the contract could've been signed before they realized) and had both a strong incentive to not back out and a conviction that they were making the right choice due to how powerful the console would end up being. They banked heavily on the 64DD too, figuring that the cartridge slot could be used for small games that benefited from quick loading times and that the 64DD would be their equivalent to CDs for larger, cheaper games.
>Essentially, Nintendo was making a bet that the market would value a more powerful console with carts over a weaker console with CDs.
I find this console generation fascinating, nobody knew how to handle 3D graphics or even CDs of even if the market could like them. The whole industry was experimenting and taking risks to see what works and what doesn't.
and now nobody takes risks 😀
Yeah, only indie devs or very small developers are willing to do something new. It's sad because the industry is full of talented people but big corporations are only interested in making the next big live service game.
Don’t forget cost. Having a CD-ROM on it would add $100 at least to the price or they would take a loss on the console.
Also at the time all CD consoles were failures up to that point and didn’t have anything amazing done with them. Nintendo had every reason to believe the same would be the case with the N64 to the point of having it not be worth it.
Did they ever figure in that CDs are super easy to scratch and frick up and kids wouldn't take good care of them.
No that's a westoid issue. Japanese kids have discipline and don't chew on their CDs.
In the earlier days of optical media it wasn't too uncommon to see discs come in plastic caddies that they would be inserted into the drive with, so the user never had to touch the actual disc.
the Sony-Nintendo contract was so screwed up that even Ken Kutaragi (the creator of the Playstation, PS2 and PS3) knew it was going to fail! so after that, who else to make a CD player for Nintendo? (I'm waiting for your answers)
>hardware designer and producer is responsible for licenscing software
>this somehow means sony wanted to steal mario from nintendo
LMAO the whole spin tendies put on it is insane. These morons probably think sony and panasonic own ever printed CD ever lol.
I remember talking to one peddling the same bullshit, they said even sega was paying Sony for the CDs so I dug out several saturn and sega cd games to show him right on the disc it says manufactured by JVC. These people have no idea how this shit works.
There were many options, sanyo, victor, hitachi, nec, Philips, Nintendo just didn't want to flush away the massive revenue stream that was slapping macronix chips into a pcb
Phillips! Oops!
what people fail to realize is that Phillips had made an incredible tech demo years earlier
Nintendo had a monopoly in cartridge manufacturing where they demanded high amounts from developers ($20 per cart) so they wanted to keep cashing it on that sweet racket. They thought that after being the dominance force for two generations, companies would still accept their bullshit terms. Sony offered them cheap manufacturing costs on top of easy and inexpensive dev kits. Basically, they got too wienery and then repeated the mistake with another memeformat for the Game Cube. Greed drove them to become a minor player in the video game business until the Wii came along.
that's not totally true.
Nintendo royalties were $14.
that and the Seal of Quality happened because at first Nintendo didn't want third parties on the Famicom!!
Square, Hudson and Enix joined forces to lobby Nintendo for the right to develop on the Famicom.
Sega had their royalties at $13...
And Sony wanted $21 in royalties on the Snes-Play Station CDs, while yes, people felt that $14 was already a steal.
so after when Kutaragi took back the Playstation.
-he made a DevKit.
-more flexibility in the production and distribution of CDs (compared to cartridges)
-and only $7 royalties!
and for the Gamecube, Nintendo had aligned itself with the competition.
the Capcom games, MGS Twin Snake, it's because Satoru Iwata had lowered the royalties.
If third-party publishers fled Nintendo it was because they had to make more effort to adapt to a controller that was too different from the others and because their games sold poorly due to the omnipresence of Nintendo exclusives.
>”This baby is a Porsche”
That will never not make me laugh.
don't forget 1996 CD technology was not todays 52x ultra fast ultra reliable ordeal
it was 2x was extra fancy and CD readers breaking down randomly era
yes but hey some already had to supply Sega, Nec, 3D0 and SNK.
I'm not sure that at the time they could supply two competitors for reasons of contract or capacity to produce.
?si=NQE-duV-Seq1FZoo
and then the loading time was a big problem.
At first Yamaguchi was against CD because it was as long as the Neo Geo CD, it's really very long.
then Sony were the first to halve it using RAM, which convinced Yamauchi to switch to CD at Sony. (Loading like Neo-Geo CDZ)
but after the cancellation of the contract, they approached Philips...and the CD-i did not have as good a player as Sony.
have you seen the CD-i loading times?
do you have the loading times of the Zelda CD-i?
so what could Nintendo do?
looking for another CD player supplier at the risk of releasing the replacement for the Snes in 1998-99?
the PS1 CD-ROM is, at most, a 2x speed drive. That means a maximum sustained data transfer rate of 300 KB/sec, and that comes at a ~300 millisecond seek time just to begin to read data , it's slower , Mario 64 , Zelda not even Mario Kart would never work with this kind of mediium. That's why most PS1 games had flat level designs or divided in smaller chunks to begin with.
On a ROM cartridge ,specified at 5 to 50 MiB/s and ROM access times are on the nanosecond scale - several orders of magnitude faster, being perhaps 200ns for a read. That would be 0.0002 milliseconds. As a result, you can just easily set up a texture paging scheme, dynamically allocating textures when they're needed, and swapping them out extremely quickly when they aren't needed anymore. The ultra-fast access speed makes this virtually seamless, and you only really need a relatively small amount of RAM needed to store basically what's just currently in view and maybe a little bit extra for stuff you recently saw. Anything else can be freed up and re-allocated when some texture that's not currently in view is about to be drawn.
This is why FF VII models are gourad shaded , pre rendered backgrounds, 15 fps 3D battles to keep the animations fluid without having a shit ton of long loading times.
How about the 64DD, does it read the floppy disks fast enough for Mario or Zelda?
The Nintendo 64 Disk Drive reads data at about one megabyte per second, which is roughly comparable to a 6X PC CD-ROM drive