While reading about banjo kazooie, I read about the stop n' swop feature that was abandoned for banjo tooie because the hardware was revised so that it could only retain its current memory for 3 seconds instead of 30, rendering cartridge swapping impossible. What I wonder is, what kind of benefit did nintendo think it'd have by doing this? (and also, wouldn't it have still been possible to swap cartridges in under 3 seconds?) And while I'm at it, how was stop n' swop supposed to work? I'm not sure I understood.
I'm not stating this as absolute fact, but I'm pretty sure this was how it would have went. 1. In Tooie, certain switches would unlock the paths locked in Kazooie. 2. Turning off and removing Tooie then inserting and turning on Kazooie would allow Kazooie to read the memory from Tooie, thus acknowledging that the paths to the eggs and ice key should be open. 3. Collect the items and view the stop and swop screen. 4. Turn off and remove Kazooie and insert and turn on Tooie. 5. The memory from Kazooie would still be loaded, so Tooie would know that the stop and swop items were found and add them. 6. The items would then probably be used similarly to how they were used in the final version. That's how I think it would have went. As for the 30 second memory thing, it seems Nintendo may have changed that solely to prevent Rare from doing Stop n' Swop. Apparently the hardware revision occurred in 1999, one year after Kazooie was released (coincidence? Maybe, but I think not). Nintendo probably didn't like the idea after Rare told them and feared that it may potentially damage the consumers console. Having it only be 3 seconds would make it difficult for the average consumer to effectively swop the two carts, so Rare had no choice but to abandon stop n' swop. I'm sure it would have still been technically possible. I can power it off, swap two carts, and power it on in under a second, but little 8 year old Timmy might have a difficult time doing it, and would risk damaging the games and console trying to do it over and over again, or just simply doing it wrong. Remember, he'd have to turn it off, take the game out, put the other game in, and turn in on in less than 3 seconds. Of course, I'm no expert with N64 hardware. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me.
Shoulda used a piggy-back cart like Sonic and Knuckles. Of course S+K with a game locked on has that terrible issue of "bump the console and your progress is GONE"
I think I would have hated that. If it's anything like using a gameshark, the tiniest little bump freezes the game. I have to baby the damn thing every time I use it. Adding to Stop n' Swop, it should be noted that the items remain on the BK cart even if everything is reset. The only thing Tooie would have had to check is if the previous game had the items collected. It doesn't need to load a save or anything, it would just need to check the memory left from BK being turned on to see if the items were discovered on that particular cart.
If you carts reset when bumped you should try cleaning both the carts and your connector. They shouldn't crash or reset when bumped a bit.
It's just the extra weight and height makes it unsteady. It's okay when it's a a single game in there.
Yeah, it's not as bad when there's one game. The problem would be if they decided to link BK and BT like SEGA linked Sonic 3 and S&K. That's what I meant.
Prometheus has it down, pretty much. Basically, those BK carts that bounce around in Tooie effectively replaced SnS, and it's safe to assume that had SnS been implemented, those carts wouldn't exist. All the bonuses (Dragon Kazooie, Jinjo multiplayer, etc, and possibly Bottle's Revenge if it had been completed in time) would have been the result of doing SnS. It's unknown if Tooie would've unlocked all the SnS locations, or simply provided the sandcastle codes (I'm willing to bet the former, since they all must begin with "CHEAT"). There's a nice write-up here about the memory being changed in the N64 and a possible reason why. Also, DK64 was in the SnS mix, as text saying "ICE KEY" was found via hacking the game.
DRAM holding its contents is nothing new, I've personally observed 99% data retention for several minutes after cutting power to some DDR I was working on. And this is "modern" stuff. This happens all the time because DRAM is essentially a huge array of capacitors. It's pretty obvious Nintendo went through many revisions of the N64 hardware during its lifetime. There are 8 NTSC mobo revisions in the wild and almost as many PAL variants. They respun the CPU at least once (for the A revision) and probably the RCP as well, as time marches on it made sense for them to take advantage of new fab processes and yield more chips per wafer. NEC manufactured the bulk of the N64 chipset, including the RDRAM. There was initially plans to use Toshiba RDRAM but I have never seen any in shipping units. Short version: the data retention is a completely unintentional side effect due to the way DRAM is made and since they changed processes in the fab this will always affect unknowns in ways that may be hard to plan. Another before I forget-all rdram though due to process revisions may be capable of faster clocks or lower latency is ALWAYS initialized the same way. So this crap about newer N64s having faster RDRAM is a load of garbage, it would cause gobs of problems, break compatibility and screw up hardcoded timing loops that depend on the RDP fillrate which is tied to RDRAM latency and throughput
