Third party. Even if it fails, you can get two or three for the price of the official one. I don't think they fail all that often... I've been using my N64 with a third party expansion for years without trouble.
They don't "overheat". They simply aren't properly cooled because the designer skimped and didn't put the shielding nor the heatsink the chip requires to work properly... If you're a crafty individual you can fix it yourself. Some crafty people even figured out how to put larger RDRAM chips inside the N64 and keep using the terminator/jumper pack ...
Do tell. What does using a larger RDRAM chip do? I don't understand how that would improve performance unless you were running homebrew on it.
Makes you have the same total RAM the N64 would have with the memory expansion ram installed, but without the memory expansion ram actually being installed. You just put a pair of bigger RAM chips inside the console.
All the expansion pak is is a piece of fiberglass PCB with copper traces and two Rambus chips. Nothing complicated. I could probably churn out a few dozen if I had access to cheap PCB manufacturing facilities and the spec RD-RAM chips. Indeed. The only problem is when you try to play Space Station Silicon Valley and it doesn't work due to shoddy coding. I've also had Zelda OoT lock up while using a GameShark with the expansion pak randomly. If you're looking to buy an expansion pak gamecast I have a Nintendo made model on hand available.
What??? Controlled-impedance PCB design sure ain't easy! Your best bet would be to clone Nintendo's since these expansion traces need 1.5+ GHz bandwidth and just designing for a few hundred MHz is complicated. Even cloning Nintendo's would be hard since you'd need to measure the copper density and find out the exact PCB composition and tweak it for the new manufacturer.
Didn't think about that. Probably why the preference is to remove the old chips and pop in larger ones rather than cloning the thing.
I've seen some "Retro64" ones on eBay, and some person opened one up and it had the same board and everything of the official one, excluding the casing of course. So I -guess- those won't fail too much, but I could be wrong :<
Blaze had have released an expansion ram, claiming to be faster/more reliable than the official one. A friend had bought it fron lik-sang back in the day, worked great for many years straight without any issues.
true but i cant seem too find those expansion packs too often, and if they ask way too much. are there still web shops that sell those third party versions?
The price has gone up lately, but you can still get them off ebay for around $20 to $25 BIN, and less if you win an auction. Third party (mostly Interact) expansion packs are the norm on ebay, with a few Nintendo packs tossed in at the upper end of the prices.
My expansion pak is third party, a Pelikan one, and I've had it since before I bought Perfect Dark, so it's getting on for thirteen years old now, and it's seen a *lot* of use (I play PD fanatically, it's my favourite ever game, and the reason I bought an Everdrive 64 is to play Goldeneye X, which is Perfect Dark modded with Goldeneye's weapons and maps) and has never let me down. It actually sticks out of the N64, it's heat sink/top things sticks out of the N64's expansion hole by a couple of centimeters, which I assume is to aid in radiating the heat out of the console. The heat sink does get warm to the touch, but not hot, and I've never had any trouble with it.
i got an original one locally for about 20$. if you are lucky (i wasn't), a N64 might come preequipped with it.
Most 3rd party ones use Nintendo parts on them. Seen many taken apart before showing Nintendo labels...
