Video Game Gazette

N64 Archive

Nintendo N64 3/4 view

The Super Nintendo was very long lived. Other companies had made cd-rom attachments for their systems. 32-bit systems such as the 32x, Sega Saturn, 3DO, and Sony Playstation were also on the market. Nintendo finally released the N64 in 1996. It looks something like a cross between a 3DO FZ-1 and a Super Nintendo. It was the first genuine 64-bit system, leaping past the 32-bit next generation systems. The original price was $199.00.

Nintendo N64 front view
Nintendo resisted the temptation to employ disk based media. The downside to this was the smaller storage capacity of cartridges. The upside was quick access time. The core of the N64 is a 64-bit R4300i RISC processor running at 93.75MHz. It has 64-bit data paths, and registers with 5-stage pipelining. The system has a 64-bit RISC co-processor running at 62.5MHz. There is a Pixel Drawing Processor (RDP) built into co-processor. It is capable of producing 32,000 simultaneous colors from a pallete of 16.7 million colors. The N64 can render 150,000 polygons per second. Its resolution is 640x480 pixels. The system has 24 channels of 16-bit stereo sound. The system has 4 megabytes of RAM and is upgradeable to 36 megabytes. This is more than enough, as the cartridge access time is small.

Nintendo N64 controller
The Nintendo 64 has four controller ports. Although this was not an innovation, it was certainly a welcome addition to the system. The most unusual apsect of the N64 is its controller. It has three 'udders'. The right side contains four buttons. The left side contains a control pad. The middle had a proportional thumb stick. The controller also has top buttons, a rear button, and an expansion port on the botton for the rumble pack.

Classic games for the system include
Super Mario 64
The following is a complete list of N64 games released in the USA.