Nintendo 64
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| Released: | 1996-06-23 |
| Discontinued: | 2003-11-30 |
| Developer: | Nintendo |
| Type: | Hardware |
The Nintendo 64 (originally announced as the Nintendo Ultra 64) is a fifth-generation video game console by Nintendo, named after its 64-bit processor. The Nintendo 64 was the last of the home consoles to use more expensive game cartridges over optical disks. A widely-unpopular disk version of the Nintendo 64 was released in Japan called the 64DD.
Games
Music and Sound
The Nintendo 64 didn't have a special chip just for sound. Instead, audio was handled by the console's Reality Coprocessor, specifically the Reality Signal Processor portion, although the NEC VR4300 (main CPU) could also process data if need be. The processor could be programmed to handle a variety of audio codecs including RAW PCM, MP3, MIDI, and various tracked modules. It could theoretically mix 100 channels of PCM audio, but this would require the entire system's resources. Audio playback could be sampled up to 48 kHz at 16-bit. However, since ROM cartridges were so small, games rarely used this level of quality.
As with Nintendo's previous cartridge-based systems, the Nintendo 64's cartridge slot included two pins that allowed for cartridges to include audio add-on chips, though like virtually all of Nintendo's systems after the NES, no commercially-released games made use of these pins, as including any audio hardware that offered any significant upgrade over the system's existing capabilities wouldn't have been cost-effective.
Links
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64 - Wikipedia.
