The Nintendo 64 was a Silicon Graphics workstation design cut down to the price of a toy. Nintendo and SGI announced it together in San Francisco on 23 August 1993 as “Project Reality”, promising a home machine for about $250. What reached Japanese shops on 23 June 1996 had one custom chip at its centre, SGI’s Reality Coprocessor, and that chip controlled everything: memory, graphics, sound and video output. Even its graphics pipeline was a program. The game chose which one to load.
Nintendo made two other choices that set it apart from the CD-based PlayStation and Saturn. It kept cartridges, which load almost instantly but hold far less and cost far more to make. And it put four controller ports on the front. Shigeru Miyamoto explained why to Edge in 1996: “for the first time we have a machine with a fast enough CPU to handle four independent screens at speed. That’s why we decided to include four joypad ports on the machine itself.” Nintendo’s own figures put lifetime sales at 32.93 million, about 20.6 million of them in the Americas.
Fast facts
- Manufacturer: Nintendo, with the Reality Coprocessor designed by Silicon Graphics.
- Launched: Japan 23 June 1996; United States 29 September 1996; Britain 1 March 1997.
- Launch prices: ¥25,000; $199.95; £250.
- CPU: a 64-bit MIPS R4300-series processor (NEC’s VR4300) at 93.75 MHz, with a 32-bit connection to the rest of the machine.
- Reality Coprocessor (RCP): 62.5 MHz. It contains the Reality Signal Processor (RSP), which runs geometry and audio microcode, and the Reality Display Processor (RDP), which draws pixels.
- Memory: 4 MB of Rambus DRAM, built from nine-bit bytes; a 4 MB Expansion Pak doubles it.
- Texture memory: 4 KB inside the RDP.
- Resolution: 256×224 to 640×480.
- Media: cartridge; the 64DD magnetic-disk drive was sold only in Japan.
- Controllers: four ports built in.
- Sales: 32.93 million worldwide (Nintendo).
One chip in the middle of everything
Nintendo’s Ultra 64 Programming Manual opens its hardware chapter with a sentence that reorganises the machine:
The RCP is the center of the game; all data must pass through it. It acts as the memory controller for the CPU.
The R4300 does not address memory itself. On the far side of the processor’s bus sits the Reality Coprocessor, and memory is on the far side of that. The manual describes every other part in relation to the same chip: “Attached to the RCP are memory chips, the MIPS R4300 CPU, and some miscellaneous I/O chips.”
There is only one pool of memory, and everything draws on it at once. The RDP renders into a framebuffer in main memory. The video interface reads that framebuffer to make the picture, and the audio interface fetches sound data from the same memory to feed the audio DACs. The processor’s code and data live there too. 64 Magazine noticed where the savings had been made: the R4300i “only has a 32-bit system interface, to keep down costs”, with two caches (16 KB for instructions and 8 KB for data, according to NEC’s manual) to keep it busy between trips to memory.
Earlier machines such as the Commodore 64 and the Amiga also made the processor and the video hardware share memory. On the N64 the sharing is the whole design, and the RCP is the referee.
The graphics pipeline is a program you choose
The most consequential thing in the manual is that the N64’s geometry stage is not fixed. The RSP runs microcode from its own 4 KB of instruction memory, and Nintendo shipped several versions:
There are three different versions of RSP geometry microcode: gspFast3D, gspLine3D, and gspTurbo3D.
Elsewhere the list runs to six: gspFast3D, gspF2DNoN, gspLine3D, gspTurbo3D, gspSuper3D and gspSprite2D. They are not interchangeable. gspFast3D is “the optimized, full-featured 3D polygonal geometry microcode”. gspTurbo3D buys speed by giving things up, and the manual lists exactly what:
The features not supported by gspTurbo3D are: Clipping, lighting, perspective-corrected textures, and matrix stack operations. The quality of the anti-aliasing also suffers, due to the lack of precision … This loss of precision can also manifest itself as various visual artifacts, depending on the content.
gspSuper3D likewise “does not support perspective corrected” textures. So two N64 games can differ in whether their textures are perspective-corrected at all. That was a choice the developer made when building the game, not a property of the console.
The routing was a choice too. The RSP could feed the rasteriser directly, or write its commands to memory for later. Nintendo suggests using the second method to give the two halves of the chip different jobs: “you could use the RSP for audio processing while the RDP is processing commands stored in DRAM.” The same processor computed a game’s 3D geometry and mixed its sound, so programmers had to schedule the two.
Four kilobytes of texture
Once the RSP has transformed a triangle, the RDP draws it. Here the N64 did work that earlier consoles left undone: each texture sample is smoothed with “a 4-to-1 bilinear filter”, edges are anti-aliased in two passes (once as pixels are drawn, and again by the video interface as the picture goes out), and a z-buffer sorts out which surface is in front. The ninth bit of each byte of Rambus memory exists for this. In the manual’s words, the “normally hidden ninth bit is used for antialiasing and z-buffering hardware”. That is why Nintendo’s 1995 specification quoted the memory as “36Megabits (or 4.5 Megabytes)”.
The cost was texture memory. The RDP samples textures only from its own on-chip TMEM, and TMEM holds 4 KB. The manual’s advice is blunt: “On-chip texture memory is not large (4 KB). If you are stamping trees in your scene, you should render in texture order.” A texture had to be small, or palettised, or loaded again and again from main memory, where each load competed with everything else for the shared bus.
Developing on a workstation
Development hardware followed the SGI lineage. In 1995, before any target hardware existed, Edge reported that “Nintendo’s developers have to get to grips with a Silicon Graphics Onyx”, a machine far more powerful than the console. They switched features off to approximate it, and one developer said it was not working: “What they are switching off in the Onyx isn’t enough.”
By 1996 the manual described the finished arrangement: an N64 board on a card inside an SGI Indy workstation.
The ROM cartridge is replaced by 16 megabytes of RAM, called the ramrom, that is accessible from both the Indy workstation over the GIO bus and the RCP over the PBUS
Sixteen megabytes stood in for the cartridge, four times the console’s own main memory.
The cartridge decision
Nintendo’s choice of cartridges over CD was argued over in the press from the start, and Edge recorded costs that are easy to forget.
Nintendo capped the size of the first games. In May 1995 Edge reported “Nintendo’s insistence that the first games developed for the Ultra 64 be no larger than 100 megabits before compression — a requirement that is causing considerable problems for eager programmers and designers.” A hundred megabits is twelve and a half megabytes, against a CD’s 650. A developer quoted later that year set the price of that format against the only real precedent: “The Neo-Geo … had 100 megabit carts available for it, and they were very expensive.” The Neo Geo’s cartridges were among the most expensive games ever sold. A pre-launch specification printed by Edge listed cartridges of 64 to 512 megabits, that is 8 to 64 MB.
The cartridge was also fast, with no drive to spin up. The manual gives ROM transfer rates of “50 Meg/sec peak, 5 Meg/sec from typical slow ROMs”, so the speed of a game’s data depended on which ROM chips its publisher paid for.
Edge did allow the decision one merit, and it is the argument Nintendo’s defenders still make: cartridges meant “developers will be forced to concentrate on game engines and playability rather than trying to fill CDs”.
Delays and launches
The machine was late. It was announced as Project Reality, renamed Ultra 64, and renamed again as Nintendo 64. Edge ran “Nintendo’s Ultra 64 delayed” as a cover line in July 1995. In February 1996 it reported a Japanese launch set for 21 April at ¥25,000. Then Nintendo moved the date to 23 June, and Nintendo of America blamed “supply limitations on the chips because we are using state-of-the-art technology which only an SGI-licensed foundry can produce”.
The Japanese launch was calm by Super Famicom standards. Edge’s reporter found queues in Akihabara on the morning of Sunday 23 June that “had disappeared by lunchtime”. Nintendo had spread 300,000 machines across convenience stores as well as games shops and taken hundreds of thousands of pre-orders. Retailers reported 250,000 sold on the first day. Almost every buyer also took Super Mario 64: most shops would only sell the console together with the game.
America followed at midnight on 29 September 1996. Edge reported that the initial allocation of 350,000 sold out within three days. The price was $199.95.
Britain waited until 1 March 1997, and N64 Magazine’s first issue put the price plainly: “Even at a bank-account-evacuating £250, the N64 is worth every penny.” In the same weeks Nintendo cut the price to ¥16,800 in Japan and $149 in America. Edge noted that £250 was “extravagantly expensive” by comparison. Within three months N64 Magazine was reporting “the slashing of the Nintendo 64’s price from £250 to £150”.
Four players on one screen
The four ports shaped the library. Edge previewed Mario Kart 64 in early 1996, under the working title “Mario Kart-R”, and singled out “the addition of a four-player split screen mode”. Rare’s GoldenEye 007 added “a fourplayer option” before its release in 1997, as Edge reported from that year’s E3, and Rare’s Perfect Dark built on it in 2000.
The Expansion Pak and the 64DD
The 4 MB of main memory could be doubled by a plug-in Expansion Pak. At first it was an option: a mail-order advert in N64 Magazine in 2000 marked the games that were “Hi-res RAM expansion compatible”. Later games depended on it. Rare’s Donkey Kong 64 came with one in the box, and Edge’s review of Perfect Dark said the game required “you to invest in a Expansion Pak if you wish to indulge in anything other than a” cut-down version.
The Pak had been meant for a bigger add-on. Nintendo planned a magnetic-disk drive, the 64DD, which sat under the console. It appeared “in near-complete form” at Shoshinkai in November 1996, with disks of about 64 MB, “approx. 32 megabytes” of them writeable. Miyamoto had told Edge in 1996 that he was “very interested in the potential of the writable storage device”. Then its games moved to cartridge. Edge reported in 1997 that the new Zelda, which became The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, “was originally slated for a 64DD release”. The drive finally went on sale on 1 December 1999, only in Japan and only by subscription. Buyers took a starter kit holding the drive, a modem, an Expansion Pak and a mouse, and paid for it by the month, from ¥1,500. The fee also covered Randnet, Nintendo’s online service with Recruit, which Edge reported would open with 100,000 memberships. 64 Magazine wondered who it was for, now that the Pokémon games “originally planned for the DD” had all moved to cartridge.
Sales and later history
Nintendo’s figures give the Nintendo 64 32.93 million sales: 5.54 million in Japan, 20.63 million in the Americas and 6.75 million elsewhere, with 224.97 million games. That was fewer than the Super Nintendo’s 49.10 million. It was also well behind the PlayStation. Edge observed in 1998 that the N64 “sold exceptionally well until last Christmas (especially in the US), when a lack of software enabled PlayStation to firmly cement its lead”. Nintendo’s ledger shows shipments falling from about 500,000 in the year to March 2001 to about 10,000 the year after, once the GameCube had arrived in September 2001.
N64 games returned in October 2021 as part of the Expansion Pack tier of Nintendo Switch Online.
Sources
- Edge issue 2, November 1993, news: the Nintendo and Silicon Graphics press conference of 23 August 1993, “Project Reality” and the $250 target.
- Edge issue 20, May 1995: the 100-megabit limit, the cartridge decision and development on the SGI Onyx.
- Edge issue 22, July 1995: cover line “Nintendo’s Ultra 64 delayed”.
- Edge issue 25, October 1995: the Neo Geo comparison; pre-release specification box with cartridge sizes.
- Edge issue 29, February 1996: Shoshinkai report and “Tech specs” box (93.75 MHz CPU, 36-megabit Rambus DRAM, 62.5 MHz RCP, 256×224 to 640×480); the planned 21 April date at ¥25,000; interview with Shigeru Miyamoto (four joypad ports, the writable storage device); preview of Mario Kart-R.
- Nintendo Magazine System (Australia) issue 37, April 1996: a further delay and the dropping of the Ultra 64 name.
- Edge issue 32, May 1996, news: the move to 23 June and the chip supply explanation.
- Edge issue 35, August 1996, p. 6: the Japanese launch.
- Edge issue 39, December 1996, news: the US launch and the 350,000 sell-out.
- Edge issue 41, January 1997: Shoshinkai 1996 and the 64DD specification.
- Edge issue 43, March 1997: the UK launch on 1 March.
- Edge issue 44, April 1997, news: price cuts in Japan and the US; the £250 UK price compared.
- Nintendo Power issue 94, March 1997: retail value $199.95.
- N64 Magazine issue 1, April 1997: the £250 price. Issue 3, June 1997: the cut to £150.
- 64 Magazine issue 1, May 1997, technical guide: the R4300i at 93.75 MHz, its 32-bit interface and caches, the SGI-designed 62.5 MHz coprocessor.
- 64 Magazine issue 35, December 1999: the Japan-only 64DD, subscription and Randnet.
- Edge issue 47, July 1997, E3 preview: GoldenEye 007 with a four-player option.
- Edge issue 62, September 1998: the N64 against the PlayStation.
- Edge issue 79, December 1999, news: Randnet and the 1 December 1999 64DD release.
- Edge issue 85, June 2000: Perfect Dark review and the Expansion Pak.
- N64 Magazine issue 39, March 2000, mail-order advertisement: games marked “Hi-res RAM expansion compatible”. Issue 40, April 2000, buyer’s guide: Donkey Kong 64 sold “with exp pak”.
- Edge issue 46, June 1997: Zelda “originally slated for a 64DD release”.
- Nintendo, Nintendo Ultra 64 Programming Manual (NU6-06-0030-001G, 21 October 1996; parts marked draft), hardware architecture, graphics microcode and RDP chapters: the RCP as memory controller; RSP and TMEM sizes; microcode versions; bilinear filtering, anti-aliasing and the ninth bit; ROM transfer rates; the ramrom development system. https://archive.org/details/NintendoUltra64ProgrammingManualAddendums
- NEC, MIPS VR4300 Microprocessor User’s Manual (1995): cache sizes and 32-bit external bus.
- Nintendo Co., Ltd., “Consolidated Sales Transition by Region” (IR historical data, as of 31 March 2026): hardware and software units by region. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/historical_data/index.html
- Wikipedia, “Nintendo Switch Online” (web, secondary): Nintendo 64 games in the Expansion Pack tier from 26 October 2021.