Okay, I've always known that the N64 has 4MB of ram, and that the Expansion Pack adds an additional 4MB, but I wonder. If you were to make your own "Expansion Pack", could you actually increase the ram to where it grants an additional 8MB or something instead of 4?
Yes.
There are a few sources claiming that a N64 will run with 12MB of RAM, and all of it is usable. If you just want to build something, this is a good starting point.
Nintendo's boot code is capable of recognizing up to 16MB, so this is the practical limit if you're intending to use the extra RAM with existing games or small modifications thereof. You can reach this amount just by swapping RDRAM chips on existing PCBs, if you're clever about it.
It may be possible to reprogram the RDRAM controller to set up additional RAM beyond 16MB. However, this depends on the RDRAM controller being able to address such large amounts of RAM. As far as I know, no one has ever tested this.
Joe wrote:
As far as I know, no one has ever tested this.
Hardly anyone has done anything on the N64. I find it funny how many people like the SNES and the N64, but how little there is being done for them. (Literally nothing on the N64.) It seemed like the N64's main problem (no, cartridges are not a problem) was the ram size, which had developers stretching tiny textures across large surfaces. With the N64, is it possible to put hardware in the cartridges like the SNES?
(Oh yeah, hasn't the lock out chip never been reversed engineered?)
Espozo wrote:
It seemed like the N64's main problem (no, cartridges are not a problem) was the ram size, which had developers stretching tiny textures across large surfaces. With the N64, is it possible to put hardware in the cartridges like the SNES?
Yes, but I'm not sure what you'd do with it. If you want bigger textures, throw more ROM at it and stream uncompressed textures directly from ROM to RDP.
Espozo wrote:
(Oh yeah, hasn't the lock out chip never been reversed engineered?)
Not yet.
im very interested in this whole ram expansion idea and would love to see someone do it. as for the lockout chip, why not have a contest or something with a prize and whatnot to encourage someone or a team of people to crack that thing.
im also curious to what other lockout chips havent been cracked?
Joe wrote:
Nintendo's boot code is capable of recognizing up to 16MB, so this is the practical limit if you're intending to use the extra RAM with existing games or small modifications thereof.
Wouldn't the games have to be modified to be able to take advantage of the extra RAM?
I seem to remember that on early N64 emulators, Tetrisphere was more stable with an Expansion Pak than without one. So perhaps games just run their garbage collection or whatever less often with more available RAM.
Tetrisphere? The New Tetris? How many different Tetris games does the N64 need, with none of them actually just being Tetris?
The
Tetris games for N64 were Capcom's
Magical Tetris Challenge, H2O's
The New Tetris, and Seta's
Japan-only Tetris 64 that included a pulse sensor.
Tetris Attack for Super NES and
Tetrisphere for Nintendo 64 were from a period when Elorg was trying to get the
Tetris brand everywhere, an overexposure strategy that Henk Rogers of The Tetris Company
now regrets. Had saner heads prevailed,
Tetrisphere would have been released under its original title
Phear. And during the N64 era,
Tetris Attack was renamed to
Puzzle League outside Japan (while retaining its
Panel de Pon title in Japan).
Quote:
Literally nothing on the N64
Well,
there's this, which requires the RAM expansion pak.
Asaki wrote:
Wouldn't the games have to be modified to be able to take advantage of the extra RAM?
Games that do not use the expansion pak will not use any additional RAM either. Games that do use the expansion pak might automatically use the additional RAM, if the developers didn't hard-code the assumption that there will be exactly 4MB or 8MB of RAM.
Espozo wrote:
Tetrisphere? The New Tetris? How many different Tetris games does the N64 need, with none of them actually just being Tetris?
And who in their right mind would pay serious $ to play Tetris on a N64?
WedNESday wrote:
And who in their right mind would pay serious $ to play Tetris on a N64?
Wait for it...
You know, I just looked something up regarding the N64:
Wikibooks wrote:
Actual texture memory is only 4KB -- only allowed to operate on this amount at a time.
What the heck? Only 4KB of textures can be onscreen at a time? This is phenomenally low, as it would only be 1/16 of the SNES, MD's and PCE's vram size. I always hear about the Expansion Pak adding larger, higher quality textures, but from that statement, I am getting the impression that it wouldn't help at all, unless the Expansion Pak has the ability to increase texture memory size or something.
Perhaps the Expansion Pak allows more textures to be cached, uncompressed, lighted per pixel, or whatever in a single scene, as opposed to using even more Gouraud shading or textures even smaller than 64x64. The N64 was thought to have two signature looks: cartoony (with Gouraud shaded untextured polygons) and muddy (with textures too small).
So it really is 4KB? Jesus, that is low. It would have thought that the reason that only 4KB of textures are being used at a time is because of something with the GPU, and not a memory issue (ram must have been cheaper then then when they built the SNES) because I doubt it would have costed them hardly anything. I guess it was just a ram issue, but could they
really have not expanded it? I mean come on, there was 4MB of ram. Did Nintendo have some sort of budget when they designed the system, picked all the most expensive parts, and then when they finished everything else and got to texture memory, and only have $10 left? I'm actually impressed that the games look as good as they do then, considering that extreme constraint. Anyway, people always talk about how big the PlayStation's texture memory was, but I cannot find it. This is what I found on Wikipedia, but I don't get it.
Wikipedia wrote:
1 MB VRAM (later models contained SGRAM) for framebuffer
2 KB texture cache (132MB/sec memory bus bandwidth, 32-Bit wide)
64 bytes FIFO buffer
Are VRAM and the texture cache not the same thing? What the heck is a FIFO buffer?
Espozo wrote:
(ram must have been cheaper then then when they built the SNES) because I doubt it would have costed them hardly anything.
This isn't just memory. The SNES's RAM, although larger, only had to get its answer out by the relative eternity of 180ns; the N64's texture RAM had to get its results out in ... hard to say, but somewhere between 2 and 10 ns.
It was physically part of the
RDP (hence why it wasn't expandable after-the-fact), and may have been hindered since its design was often described as "a stripped down SGI Indy".
Quote:
Are VRAM and the texture cache not the same thing?
No. They're each designed for different memory access patterns: The texture cache needs to be addressed by tracing paths across a square at arbitrary angles (hence why early ones required textures to be a power of 2 on both axes) and quite fast, while the VRAM here is used as a framebuffer, and so basically only needs fast in-order writes and medium-speed in-order reads.
I read about the RDP and it said that texture memory is effectively halved to 2KB, because of look up tables or something, which is truly insane.
lidnariq wrote:
Espozo wrote:
(ram must have been cheaper then then when they built the SNES) because I doubt it would have costed them hardly anything.
This isn't just memory. The SNES's RAM, although larger, only had to get its answer out by the relative eternity of 180ns; the N64's texture RAM had to get its results out in ... hard to say, but somewhere between 2 and 10 ns.
What good is swapping out textures if there still isn't any space? Unless... Can the N64 somehow swap out textures while everything is being rendered, but still having the older textures present? In that case, only speed is your enemy. (how fast is 2 - 10 ns relative to swapping out textures?)
You know though, if the expansion pack doesn't increase texture memory, why is there such a common misconception that it does? Here's an example when Wikipedia is talking about the Expansion Pak's purpose in Majora's Mask:
Quote:
Utilized to increase texture detail
Sorry if this is standard 3D graphics stuff, but I have the slightest bit of experience.
Espozo wrote:
Can the N64 somehow swap out textures while everything is being rendered, but still having the older textures present?
Exactly. It can take an arbitrary and widely-varying amount of time to draw a single polygon (even if flat shaded), so you don't have the same kind of "display X sprites every frame" that previous generation hardware had ... and you also don't have the requirement that you finish in 1/60th of a second. Instead, you tell the GPU to draw a triangle ... or a bunch of triangles ... with a bunch of properties.
I know nothing about the N64 3d programming interface, but I'd randomly guess it looks like IRIS GL.
You know, I actually found a pretty cool article about the N64's hardware, if anyone wants to read it.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/U ... Nintendo64 It pretty much just answered all my questions, except this when it is talking about work-arounds to the N64's texture situation:
Quote:
The best method took a few years to develop. It was to program the textures to steadily stream through the buffer. It wasn't as easy as it sounds, but developers like Rare and Factor 5 got the most advanced graphics from the N64 through this method.
Didn't they say that games constantly did this, because 64x64 was the largest texture size because of the 4KB limit, and that games constantly had to change out the texture or something?
You know, a random question, but because some people don't like the blurry look or if you wanted to make a 2D game, is it actually possible to turn off anti-aliasing and tri-linear filtering?
Quote:
The system can actually push 500,000 polygons in real time
Espozo wrote:
You know, a random question, but because some people don't like the blurry look or if you wanted to make a 2D game, is it actually possible to turn off anti-aliasing and tri-linear filtering?
I think Toy Story 2 did that (or am I thinking of the terrible Dreamcast port?).
There are a few 2D games for the N64.
Toy Story 2 definitely still uses tri-linear filtering and stuff. Otherwise, it would look like the PS1 version, which is a bit more jagged in comparison. I looked at Yoshi's Story, but I'm not sure. (The quality on the video wasn't the greatest) You know, if you had an object that was perfectly 64x64 for the texture size and was distanced perfectly away from the camera and wasn't rotating or anything, wouldn't it actually look normal, or would the N64 make it look muddy because it is still trying to smoothen it out?
You know, I wonder how Metal Slug would fare on the N64... It has the advantage over the PlayStation and the Saturn in that it can directly stream information from the cartridge...
I have an N64 with the on-board RAM transplanted so it has the full 8MB on-board and can run expansion pak games like Majora's Mask and DK64 with just a jumper pak. I also have another expansion pak around here somewhere, so if anybody's curious to try something with 12MB I can do that.
I certainly wouldn't object to you trying.
qwertymodo wrote:
I have an N64 with the on-board RAM transplanted so it has the full 8MB on-board and can run expansion pak games like Majora's Mask and DK64 with just a jumper pak.
That only sounds the tiniest bit ridiculous @_@
Asaki wrote:
qwertymodo wrote:
I have an N64 with the on-board RAM transplanted so it has the full 8MB on-board and can run expansion pak games like Majora's Mask and DK64 with just a jumper pak.
That only sounds the tiniest bit ridiculous @_@
That only sounds the tiniest bit awesome!
The primary reason for a board like mine would be for making a BenHeck style portable, which is actually the reason I did the mod, I just haven't gotten around to the rest of it. By installing the full RAM onto the board directly, you're able to remove the memory pak slot entirely, which then allows the board to lay flat without anything sticking out at a right angle, which makes for a much better fit case-wise (assuming you also remove and reorient the cart slot like a typical GameBoy cart slot instead of the normal straight-out-from-the-board orientation). You just have to wire up a few resistors on the data lines to terminate the RAM bus (basically the equivalent of hardwiring the jumper pak).
In any case, if you have anything in particular you'd like me to test, just let me know. I'm not nearly as familiar with the N64 library as I am with the SNES, so I'm not really sure what games may or may not be of interest here. I do have a 64Drive, so I can test anything, including homebrew ROM's if anybody wants to write some code to explicitly test it.
Here's a crappy photo of it in action, MM w/Jumper Pak
Espozo wrote:
You know, if you had an object that was perfectly 64x64 for the texture size and was distanced perfectly away from the camera and wasn't rotating or anything, wouldn't it actually look normal, or would the N64 make it look muddy because it is still trying to smoothen it out?
HUDs in N64 games are pixel perfect, but even ignoring that, yeah it's doable (even without turning off any of the filters) as long as you make sure the UV coordinates and the transformation aren't off by even one pixel. This is true for
any GPU (modern ones follow this rule as well, it's just how the algorithms work).
qwertymodo wrote:
The primary reason for a board like mine would be for making a BenHeck style portable...
Ah, okay, that makes sense.
Espozo wrote:
Hardly anyone has done anything on the N64. I find it funny how many people like the SNES and the N64, but how little there is being done for them. (Literally nothing on the N64.)
I found this game, apparently its a N64 homebrew
http://www.neoflash.com/forum/index.php ... 454.0.html
The rendering is in software =/
There's
this guy now making a new N64 engine... started as software but now he's just remaking it to use hardware rendering instead (with custom microcode, at that). No idea how far he'll get (it's extremely barebones right now) but hey =P