Jump to content
  • entries
    341
  • comments
    905
  • views
    262,462

N64 versus PS1


EricBall

1,535 views

This past Christmas I bought an N64 for my son (and me) to enjoy my collection of games. (Although the problem turned out to be dirty cartridges rather than a dead N64.) He's been having a blast playing Super Mario 64 and the Mario Party games.

This nostalgia rekindled my interest in what is under the hood of both it and the original PlayStation. It turns out there's a lot of similarities between the two, more than I would have expected.

Both used a MIPS CPU (PSX: 32bit R3051 @ 33.8688 MHz, N64: 64bit R4300 @ 93.75MHz), both have a vector coprocessor (PSX: Geometry Transformation Engine, N64: Reality Signal Processor) and a graphics / triangle / texture processor.

Of course there are the obvious differences too. The N64 is cartridge based, while the PSX is CD based. The PSX has a macroblock decoder for video decompression. The PSX GTE is integrated with the CPU (similar to the old 80x87 math coprocessors), while the N64 RSP has dedicated instruction & data RAM (like the SPEs in the PS3 Cell processor). The N64 has 4MB of main memory (500MB/s) while the PSX has 2MB of main memory (132MB/s) plus 1MB of memory dedicated to the GPU and 512K of memory dedicated to the sound processor.

And even though the N64 had better "numbers" (e.g. CPU clock) than the PSX, Sony sold three times as many PlayStations as Nintendo sold N64s. And I have some theories why:

  • First, Sony released the PlayStation 20 months before Nintendo released the N64, which gave them definite traction in the marketplace. The N64 launch library was also very thin (no matter how good SM64 was). Developers could already see the "virtuous cycle" starting with the PlayStation.
  • Second, Sony's decision to use CDs (an easy decision for them given they helped invent CDs) and Nintendo's decision to stick with cartridges had a huge impact for multiple reasons
    • CDs allowed developers to store more - more game content and/or prerecorded audio & video (which the built-in decoder enabled)
    • lower manufacturing cost, it cost much less to press a CD than to manufacture a cartridge so higher profit per sale at a given price
    • I heard that one of the reasons Nintendo stuck with cartridges is Nintendo did all of the manufacturing (charging publishers up front for runs of cartridges to boot), whereas the PlayStation CD could be replicated by nearly anyone who could press CDs.

     

  • Third, while Nintendo provided developers with C libraries, they didn't provide any low level details. And the provided graphics libraries were much slower than the "numbers" would suggest. So unless you were willing to spend a lot of time & effort reverse-engineering the libraries (e.g. Rare & Factor 5), it wasn't possible to fully exploit the N64 hardware and work around limitations. On the other hand, early third party developer Naughty Dog was able to leverage the PlayStation hardware at a very low level.
  • Finally, although the unified memory on the N64 allowed the CPU & RSP to update the frame buffer (which causes problems with emulators today), I suspect this caused bottlenecks in memory access (especially random access due to the latency of the Rambus memory).

 

Edited by EricBall
fix bullets

  • Like 1

6 Comments


Recommended Comments

Sony sold more PS1's because they had a much bigger, much better software library. The reasons you listed all contributed to that, but the end user only cared about the final result: what games do I want to play? The PS1 was the first modern console I owned - I never even considered the N64. If anything, the N64's later rollout should have helped by allowing them to pitch it as a newer more "advanced" console. But the titles just weren't there. The PS1 also had multiple "killer apps" over its considerable lifespan. The N64 had... ??

 

PS1 games

 

N64 games

 

There's also this:

 

Sony sold more PS1's because they had a much bigger, much better software library. The reasons you listed all contributed to that, but the end user only cared about the final result: what games do I want to play? The PS1 was the first modern console I owned - I never even considered the N64. If anything, the N64's later rollout should have helped by allowing them to pitch it as a newer more "advanced" console. But the titles just weren't there. The PS1 also had multiple "killer apps" over its considerable lifespan. The N64 had... ??

 

That's what I mean by "virtuous cycle" - consumers buy consoles based upon the games available for that console; developers develop games for a console based upon expected sales, which is strongly dependent upon the number of people who own the console.

 

For N64 "killer apps", see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Selects#Nintendo_64for a list of games which sold over a million copies.

 

For me, Super Mario 64 was the (literal) system seller, but then I had to wait many months between games worth buying.

So the lateness (newness) of the N64 actually hurt it then, because developers were already lined up behind the PS1, and everyone knew it? Makes sense.

 

More that Sony recognized they needed third party developers to survive & succeed. So by the time the N64 hit the shelves in Japan the PS1 already had nearly 100 titles available (and certainly more announced), versus the three N64 launch titles.

 

Ben's analysis is basically the same as mine. (Although I do not believe it was possible for the N64 to execute code from the cartridge directly. Based on the docs I've found, I think everything had to be copied to RAM first (and decompressed for some games). )

Guest
Add a comment...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...