Re: N64 Review
Re: N64 Review
I have mixed feelings about the N64.
I hate the full screen anti-aliasing. It gives the effect of everything smeared with Vaseline! However boot games via emulation and you instantly see how great the games really look when viewed on a system allowing the games to run in higher resolutions with proper anti-aliasing.
This is overcome using the optional 4MB ram expansion you can plug into the N64, and for the few games that directly support this ram expansion the graphics get a big jump in quality. The best of these is Perfect Dark. Try running the game in enhances and standard graphics modes and you instantly see a huge difference. Textures are suddenly clearer and crisp, reflections and light effects are more impressive, and edge anti-aliasing is much nicer.
Audio capabilities are pretty good. However the system suffered a bit at the time because the PSX could utilise CD audio for soundtracks and streaming video, and the N64 was restricted by limited rom storage space.
And as someone else said, the controller is a love/hate device. I've always been a bit unsure of the design, with the digital or analogue hold positions meaning you can't utilise all of the controls on the controller at once, limiting what the game developers could offer. A strange idea, but I suppose it was something to be tried. I also hate the rumble paks that require batteries. The Dreamcast used a similar idea of optional additional plugin rumble packs, but they didn't require batteries. Why they couldn't power the rumble packs from the N64 is beyond me. Bad design. Also you can't have a memory pak and a rumble pak connected to a controller at once, which is annoying.
I actually own 4 N64s, all in perfect condition. 6 original controllers, loads of memory and rumble paks, plus I've got about 50 original boxed games with manuals etc... and a Mr. Backup Z64 unit.
If you don't know what a Z64 is, it sits on top of the N64 and has a Zip Drive in the side, an N64 cart slot on the top and an LCD screen. Boot the N64 with the Z64 plugged in and a cart in its own N64 cart slot and you get the Z64's OS boot menu. From here you can then load N64 roms into the Z64 memory from a Zip disk and boot the game roms, using the original cart as the boot strap to get the game to work. In addition the Z64 also has a hex editor and action reply support. It is a great unit, but now very rare and hence expensive if you can find one. It also allows you to boot roms from any region so is great to run US and Jap games on a PAL system , or other way around if used with an NTSC N64. You can also manipulate the roms, performing things like bit swapping, directly on the unit and saving the results back to the Zip disk. Plus a big advantage of using writeable Zip disks is you can set up the Z64 properties for each game to get them working perfectly, and save the config files for each game to the disk as well.
You can also hack the Z64 using custom BIOS images created by the community to replace the Zip drive with CF and SD memory card readers, and/or a harddrive. I've not tried this but it is tempting. Being able to load all of the games onto a HDD would be great. Having them all on hand at once would be just like WHDLoad.
I also owned a CD64 Plus. Similar idea to the Z64, but it sits under the N64 and connects to the console's expansion port under the system. And it has a CD-Rom drive rather than a Zip drive. So you cannot write anything back to the discs ot manipulate the files other than once loaded into ram. Other than that, once a rom is selected from a CD and loaded into the CD64's ram it functions very much the same. I however sold the CD64 earlier this year as I never used it as I prefer the Z64.
There are more good games for the N64 than most people think. I got into the N64 at the end of its life and purchased everything via ebay and second hand stores. I got some real bargains, buying large collections with consoles and lots of games for fairly low prices, and then selling on duplicate games, third party horrible controllers, and games I just didn't like. I ended up with a great N64 collection.
One thing I've however been thinking recently is that many of the game carts have battery backed up save game memory. The batteries in these carts much be getting to the end of their lives and I'm now worried if any of them will leak and damage the carts. Does anyone know anything about the carts of if this could happen? This is also a danger for SNES carts (which I also own a lot of). I must investigate this further.
Finally one other thing that annoyed me with the N64 was that it had no single save game method. The controllers have a port where you can plug a save game memory pak into. However these have silly small memory sizes and can normally only save 2 - 8 game saves on each pak (depending on the game), or alternatively some games had built in S-Ram save game ram (Mario 64 being a good example). For these games you didn't need a memory pak and could just save to the cart and not worry. I don't understand why a better solution wasn't designed into the unit as the single save method. It wasn't like Nintendo hadn't encountered save game features before. With the SNES many carts had battery backed up save game ram built in. But with the SNES it had no memory card/pak feature, so games developers had to come up with their own solutions for each cart. Sony's Playstation memory card slots on the actual unit was a much nicer design.