/vr/ - Retro Games

Wave Race is amazing shit. HOW did they make it work? And not only does it function near perfectly for what it is, they pulled it off before having years of experience as devs on the 64. Sure Nintendo knew the most about the system's secrets but still, the water and physics of the game are astounding.
All that running on pic related in 1996. For fuck's sake. Wizardry.

Also posting the N64 mobo.
It LOOKS much more simple, but it's far harder to try and emulate. Just showing that physical HW isn't all that meets the eye.

Not for nothing, but this honey looked good too(I'll always love the stock opaque system). And when a dev really wanted to pull out some great 2D, it could happen.
Truly a system broken by the tech limits of the game media and corporate policies. Technically, all three systems kicked ass. The last great arcade generation.

I only owned a Playstation. I was an SNES kid and switched to Playstation due to the fighters and RPGs.
Now, having gone back to shit I never had, without the nostalgia glasses, I can really appreciate the Megadrive(better name than Genesis to me), Saturn, and N64.
My fanboy status has been destroyed. I can only find good things in the aforementioned systems.

>>3968868
>basic knowledge
Good computer engineering doesn't befuddle programmers for 20 years.
As this cat said- >>3968804
It's shit, Jim. Yes, the goddamn thing had an uber-powerful GPU for the time, but the whole works taken together was a shit show.
Only Nintendo and their developer bitch Rare really knew how to consistently work with the thing, likely because Nintendo, being the cunts they can be at times, wanted to make the system hard to exploit and pirate. And as it seems to have been somewhat of a success.

That's the joke you missed. Nintendo's infamous crybaby antics in preventing copyright infringement are legendary, and the N64s bullshit computer science pedigree is no exception to that rule.
It's like when they moved to disc. They had to opt for a reverse-spinning drive and basically steal the mini-DVD standard and reverse it because they were scared about people being able to burn their games to disc.

>AHA! We'rr show you, firufuri gaijin kozuku! We'rr make disuku supinu za bakuwarudo! MUDA DA!
The company is run by madmen.

>>2828060
>this
>complex hardware
Quite the opposite really.

The only reason N64 is hard to emulate is because of the microcode programmable vertex shader and the fact that the hardware accelerates 3D in a bit of a different way to your modern DirectX / OpenGL compliant parts because there was no standard way of doing things back then.

This is an N64 motherboard circa 1999.

>>2491626
No, they really don't. The central chip is the GPU, the one of the left is the CPU.

I've also got a little bit of data for you guys.

The speed of the Parallel Interface (the DMA engine connected to the ROM cartridge) is 50MB/s (peak). Realistically, it's going to be 5MB/s, because that's about as fast the slow ROMs that Nintendo put into these cartridges go.

>>1755496
As mentioned above, the N64 internals are very simple. But you were right when you said that emulator programmers just pushed for limited compatibility and called it a day.

Here's a picture of the N64 motherboard. On the left is the CPU, the middle is the GPU and the bottom is the RAM. On the right are the DACs to output video and shit to your TV.

Meanwhile on Sega Saturn...