http://64dd.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=381&forum=3 56K users be warned. The insides of the 64 DD :love2: A rather expensive item to pop open ;-)
I wish he would open furter to show the reader. Also i would love to see this compaired with a dd dev unit. lol probably be cheaper to open a DD dev unit then a comercial unit (since nobody still can get a dev unit running).
I ve seen the insides of dev DD units. They just have an empty space where DDrom should be. I can't recall if there's a battery though , which i doubt somehow.
So, thats all? I knew there wasnt any extra processors (just 4MB of RAM) but man thats looks empty. About the reader, what all the fuzz about? is not much different than a ZIP drive.
actually there's a 32bit circuit in the DD. The extra ram you talk about is the expansion pak, the 64DD doesn't have RAM on it. The reader is quite different from a zip drive, considering there are 6 types of disk for the stock DD, and a totally different setup for the dev DD. Also, the way that the logical partitions are mapped and read are different from a zip disk. Stuff is handled via LBA though. The only similarity between the DD and a Zip drive is that they are magnetic disk media, none other. The 64DD is one of the "smarter" add-ons out there, if not the most clever one, what was it supposed to pack in your view? Unlike the DC's serial port, the n64 deck uses a double cart-ridge interface with a single PI access system , on a shared bus. Broadly speaking, it's like reading from two different cartridges alternating.
Yeah the 64DD actually needed the extra 4MB EP to work, I misread that part... If you ask me there wasnt much more to put into this thing. They could've added another GPU to expand the graphical capabilities of both machines but that may have a bad effect on coding, making it harder for developers to make everything work together. The only real failure I see is that they released it way too late, since at the time nobody cared about this addon at all. With the DC already out in the states most users were looking foward to the N64 successor (which was announced less than a year after the 64DD's launch). Mid or fall 97 would've been a much better launch date... BTW, what about disk access times? please tell me it was faster that a ZIP drive...
Access times depend on the radius naturally. Seek time is averaged at 75ms and there's 1 MB/sec data transfer rate. Mind you, that's more than twice as fast as the PSX or Saturn drive's speed. The device was designed to be a drive, nothing more. Adding more hardware inside would be 1) technically impossible and impractical, since the RCP and the CPU are the central stars of everything in the n64, making any external path a slow and unreliable way to process things (PI access is turn-based/burst access - how the hell would you run real-time 3d code in such as fashion? :lol 2) Why add to the cost? the damn thing was expensive to boot, and comes to prove that add-ons need to be released in a timely manner and have adequate support in order to succeed. That said, the most succesful add-on to my knowledge so far for any console (worldwide) has probably been the GB player for the GameCube However, *if* nintendo had routed their majors titles or some of them,(as they intended) to the new add-on they could have forced a good share of consumers to spill about 100-150 dollars for the add-on. This would automatically mean however that a good amount of people owning a regular n64 deck console would be left out because they couldnt afford or couldnt be bothered to expand their consoles. If it was bundled with, say Zelda 64, then it could have been stellar in my view - but if that was the case, Zelda 64DD bundle-pak would cost about 100 dead presidents to say the least, and it still wouldnt sell as much as it did when it was released regularly as a gamepak. Statistically, add-ons are sub-divisions of a larger pie, that of the console base. For the former to match the latter in absolute perimeter is an impossibility, so it's bound to occupy a smaller (often much smaller) area in the pie. This is my mathemetical proof that add-ons just can't be as widespread and succesful as their original console =)
I believe the problem with addons is that companies just wanted to get more profits by using the existing userbase as a launch pad for more products. With standalone units is just a matter of choice, yet with addons theres no such thing: you have to get the base unit to use it. So, is no surprise that addons were so popular at a time when consoles were rarely sold at cost, let alone subsidized like the X360 or PS3 today. Ergo, just like there were literally tons of peripherals at the time, addons were also a source of income for companies. Today I believe MS is also loosing money on the HDDVD addon, just to show how different things are today....
MS is not losing on the HD-DVD add on. They don't make a profit from the movies and they can't recoup losses from HD-DVD games, and as such it has been made clear by the company that the HD-DVD add on is being sold at a profit.
You're forgetting the PSX memory card and dual shock pad, both of which had near 100% user base penetration by the end of the product cycle I'm only messing with you, I know you were talking more serious hardware additions, but both of those were pretty unprecedented in gaming. Prior to that all consoles either had SRAM on cart or on-board (Saturn and Mega-CD both had the latter), and I can't think of another console that managed to phase out the original pads so entirely.
Barc0de, Not to be mean but wouldn't the Famicom disk system be more sucessful? I know it was limited to japan but it seemt do well. I dont remember the GBA Player selling all that well (they end up bundling it in japan with the gamecube). DD to me is still one of the most interesting add ons. I just hope that once it's hacked for dumping tools and emulation, beta images will start poping up on the net (seems a few people do actualy have a few alpha/beta dd games). Shadowlayer, Truthfuly unless an add on could fix the n64 issues of low t-mem or crapy microcodes, no add on could ever really improve the n64 at all (mem expansion pak help because the n64 had unified memory and not a pre allocated vram).
A good start to start dumping 64DD games would be to reverse the japanese version of FzeroX and see how it interacts with the 64DD. Then we could try to copy the disk data to ram and write it to a v64jr (in several parts) I think it can be done, but the 64DD is too rare and people with a 64DD and a v64jr are even rarer to find and nobody really cared about the very few existing 64DD games (none of the retail games are killer apps) Maybe dumping the Mother 3 discs (which we are not sure they are even legit) might be worthed. I bet that if a zelda ura disc was suddently to surface a lot of more people would be interested xD
That's very true. FDS was successful in some capacity, hence why i said Worldwide. the FDS wasn't released elsewhere, and it's doubtful that even if it had (in some form) people would trust it in the west. Well don't just hope! get cracking my boy! People would kill for the wealth of material we ve accumulated :lol:
Well i ll mess some with you too then! :lol: The rate of PSX mem-cards and dual schocks is far from 1/1 There's bound to be people without one or the other, or neither, yet still owning a PSX! lol The memory card exaple is unfair though, and the controller example is like saying that the Wii's nunchuck or Classic controller wouldnt sell because its a "special" add on. Besides, neither memcard or controllers are as expensive as "life sustaining" add-ons. //Messing with alchy mode over//
