Umm you are missing one game from Sony --- The Legend of Dragoon one of the best RPG games ever made from Sony if not ever
Eh, I haven't gotten around to playing LoD yet but I've seen some opening gameplay segments of it and it was...just okay. Visuals are really good for a PS1-era JRPG but the combat looked rather standard and
very slow.
Then again those were only the opening sections I saw. Since I've finally started playing more JRPGs lately (and catching up on ones I missed), I'll give the game a try at some point myself, but I hope the combat can either be adjusted for its speed or gets more involved not too far later into the game.
Just fucking imagine if
- N64 would’ve launched in 1995
- The N64 would’ve had a 4x CD-ROM
- The N64 would’ve had direct memory access for the VDP and a separate video ram for it
- The N64 would’ve had the extra 4mb RDRAM accessory built-in day one
The competition wouldn’t have held a candle.
It also would've costed around $349 - $399. There's a reason Nintendo went with cartridges outside of just having more control over production: costs. They'd have to pay a big amount for the CD drive (let alone a 4x one; keep in mind the PS1 and Saturn only had 2x drives and those came out late 1994 in Japan) and also pay a license for the CD technology (at least to my knowledge if DVD was anything to go by; the DVD license cost was a reason Sega avoided adding DVD to Dreamcast for example).
RAM was also
ridiculously expensive back then, in fact the entire DRAM market was found guilty of price-fixing at some point in the early-mid '90s and that's what finally got the prices to start dropping. 8 MB of RAM for a game console in 1995 would've been a big cost to incur, and if Nintendo wanted to sell N64 at a profit from Day 1, probably would've driven the console to about $399 (as-is the N64 launched for $249),
maybe $349 if lucky but you're talking about a 4x CD-ROM drive AND an extra 4MB of RAM so...
I always thought the Saturn's approach of cart & CD built into one system was the best option; use a mixed ROM/RAM cart (say 3 MB ROM/1 MB RAM) for primary game files, and the CD for storing the bulk of the rest of game files (and use the 1 MB of RAM in the mixed cart to accelerate transfer of data from the CD to the cart for faster access; might've also allowed the Saturn to not need the CD-ROM cache it had for the same purpose, and simplified some of the design while getting the cost down a little more).
The person who responded to you wasn't talking about innovation. He was talking about popularity. Since the PlayStation was more popular than the consoles before it, it's credited with popularizing the CD's use in consoles.
Yep.
See my earlier post "No one cares about Audio, just Graphics". Sony pushed a lot of audio tricks and styles with the PS1 that no other console was doing at the time, hell the closest in complexity was probably the SNES audio chip which was designed by Sony anyway.
Sadly audio is taken for granted these days but back then the PS1 was doing things that a lot of home computers could not do.
I'd say the Saturn's audio was arguably equal to the PS1's, there's even a few Saturn games that used the audio processor for non-audio (i.e graphics) tasks from time to time, as well.
The early PS1 models are famous for having excellent sound output ability but that's due to the output connectivity they supported; later models got rid of some of that so they don't carry the same badge.
Thing is, CDs were old news at the time the PS1 was released. Magazines at the time didn't even cover that fact since that was already covered by the numerous CD based consoles before it.
The press hyped the CD technology from 1991 to 1993 and then it became something not worth talking about.
The PS1 certainly got popular with non gamers but for gamers at the time CDs weren't a big deal.
PS1 was arguably the first console to make really good use of all that extra space CDs offered, though, and I'd argue they were still a big deal for most gamers because most gamers didn't buy a PC-Engine CD, or Sega/Mega CD, or a 3DO for that matter. Most of them were still primarily rocking SNESes or Genesis systems. Even in the PC space it wasn't always expected for a game to have a CD-ROM version. System Shock for example initially launched on floppy disks, they only released a CD version a little while later. Same goes for other games like DOOM. I don't think CD-ROM became a standard for PC games until the mid '90s, pretty much around the time of the PS1.
So yeah, going from carts (or floppies) holding maybe 4 MB (or 5 MB) of game code at
most, to games with over half a Gigabyte of data, was huge. And systems like the PS1 had lots of games that justified the extra space, something most other CD-based consoles of the time or before it failed to consistently do.
You missed one of the most important things ; a sound chip.
Me personally though, would have kept carts and some games would be really different without the carts. But I realize cd made more commercial sense. A 4x drive would have helped. They'd have had to charge more, but if they had the dev support people would pay it.
My ultimate n64 release would be : Carts and,
Change ram. Lower latency setup with higher bandwidth. Latency killed cpu performance and bandwidth was limited. 4mb is fine to launch with to keep costs down, and the expansion pak could still be used. The expansion helped less than a better memory setup would, hence why games like banjo and conker and a lot of Nintendo brand games didn't use it. And increasing bandwidth would have made an expansion much more potent.
Sound chip. Help the cpu free cycles up and have ps1 quality sound. The reasons for low fps on 64 sometimes? The memory setup and no soundchip.
16 kb texture cache for better textures.
Keep AA filter but remove 2nd blur pass. I really don't see any point of the blur, esp. on crt.
N64 had pretty bad dev tools though so to get it out even faster, eh probably would have been even worse. Better documentation and better treatment of 3rd party (letting everyone use custom micro code) was important as well. With the default micro code it's possible to push less polys than ps1. If it had cds, a 96 release would have been ok still.
Yeah for a late 1996 launch (roughly same dates as it actually ended up with) these aren't bad specs and stuff like the sound chip would've just been outright necessary. It definitely would've been more expensive (at least by $100, so $349) and that would've been a tough sell when both Sony and Sega were cutting their systems to $199 the same year, but with the right launch game they might've been okay.
Only that, an N64 at that price, I'm not so sure Mario 64 would've been "that" game, not unless it were a quite different game maybe? I think it'd still sell a ton of N64s but maybe 25% less with the system at that price? That said, it's also likely Sony and Sega would've kept their systems at regular prices and not cut the prices if they knew N64 were launching at $349 (altho for other reasons Sega would've still been forced to drop Saturn's price to $299 at least).
Honestly tho if it meant keeping devs like Square, Enix, Konami, Capcom etc. on-board and developing for the N64 primarily, that would've easily been worth it in the long-run for Nintendo. However, that's simply not how Yamauchi did his business, so it was simply never going to happen.