Should N64 have been a CD System?

Meh. In retrospect as a kid I'm glad Nintendo went for cartridges with N64.
While my current DVD games are in nice condition. Most of my PS1 games are insanely scratched.

Can't remember why...I think as a kid I took my care into organizing my collection then today.

I think early CDs perhaps scratched too easily.

Also, while most of my friends had modded PSX's right away and bought games at ChinaTown, N64ers bought cartridges. Not that I advocate piracy, and I've probably bought the re-releases of all my favorite titles. But, being kids on a 5 buck allowance, it sure was nice for us then to get cheap games.



So in a sense it likely helped reduce piracy. While N64 emulation was up and running fairly quickly, it lacked things the original hardware did best like having four players and a way to play on your TV easily (for kids anyways).

Whats your opinion?
CD or Cartridge?

 

I think even Nintendo would now say they made an error in sticking with cartridges.

 

There's only one answer for this: YES. Partially because they didn't use CDs, the N64 lost out on FF7. Can you imagine how much that would've increased the popularity of a system that was struggling for decent 3rd party games? It also made it a hell of a lot harder for companies to port games from CD-based systems, kinda like what's happening with Wii today.

That wasn't the only design mistake they made, of course: the lack of texture memory turned most games into Blur & Fog Fest 64. Actually, one of the great mysteries of gaming for me is how the N64 managed to sell so many units with such a weak-ass library of games and crap hardware, not to mention the hideous controller.

 

It was the amazing thing that was Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie, Star Fox 64, need I go on?

I loved the 64 controller actually for its time. I allowed for the rumble pack among other things.

Also iirc Nintendo controlled 3rd parties to a T on SNES, and they felt cartridges were the way to go to keep a stronghold. It didn't work as most games that were ported usually were sub-par. I think it had something to do with license fees for using their special cartridges.

Though they could've gone the GameCube route and made a special disk format that wasn't easily replicated like a minidisc.My cube games stand up fairly better then my PSX games that's for sure.

This also had to do with the advances in case packaging in the DVD Style definitely. I cracked most of my CD Cases for my PSX games doing one thing or another.

I hate that Ninendo used Paper sleeves for packing with N64. It made me lose the manuals for most of my 64 games. Even when I tried to keep the boxes they ended up getting squished.

If Sega could made decent cart packaging for genesis, Nintendo had no excuse.

Though I wonder how much profit PSX lost due to piracy unlike the 64.

 

I doubt that the N64 would have been a better console with a CD-Rom drive.
Were DD64 games in any way better than games released on modules? I think not.
Maybe background music would have been better with the soundtrack being played from CD-Rom. But i prefer less quality sound for no loading times.

 

You can if you like, but you'll start running out

I don't think there's much question about which platform was more profitable that generation. Don't forget there were N64 copiers at the time, too, though obviously on nothing like the scale of PSX modchips etc.

To answer the thread question, yeah. Should've tossed the rest of the hardware out with the carts as well.

 

PS1 was more profitable though need to be said that N64 was priced competitive and with an healthy profit partially thanks to the lack of CD rom subsystem ( 50$ saved per system ).

Nintendo main problem wasn't the lack of CD-rom but that they couldn't compete with the new business model introduced by Sony ( and in hindsight every gaming manufacturers went out of business in a matter of years with the exception of Nintendo ).

 

Even assuming the figures for the N64 years displayed are accurate, that has to be including handhelds during the huge Pokemon boom years. I wasn't trying to say Nintendo were short of cash, just that a console that sells 30 million units and has high manufacturing costs for each ROM chip in each game is going to be less profitable than one that sells 100 million and costs pennies per game.

 

So Microsoft was always in the red for the Xbox 360?
Why be in the business?

 

x

 

It was good for games that were designed for it and nothing else, just like the Gamecube controller (although that design was miles better than the N64 one).

That chart is pretty bad because of all the information it doesn't have. For example, does it include all systems by the companies? I'm sure the GB/GBC/GBA printed money for Nintendo, and the DS still does, especially considering how much the hardware's gotten cheaper. And is it just hardware or hardware + software profits?

 

The N64 was crippled by several bad business decisions, one of which was using carts. Carts were used to continue to fuck over publishers, since they cannot be directly compared to CD-ROMs in terms of licensing/manufacturing costs.

If the N64 had been CD-ROM based it would have had a lot more support from third parties. Games would have been cheaper and would have looked better.

 

I know i'm going off-topic, but i'm still amazed on how some of you guys manage to get CD's and DVD's scratched.

Apart from some used games i bought that already had light marks on them, none of the games i bought brand new and sealed have any kind of scratches.

 

Yeah, I don't get it either. All my PS1 games that I got new still look new. The only scratched games I have were bought used. All I can figure is bratty kids who've never been disciplined in their life.

 

Yes it should have been. I remember. At that time N wasn't really talking about piracy, they said the 64 was superior because with disk based games you had to wait for the games to load and the higher ups at that time hated loading.

The half-asses supported a CD based system, the CD-i, and I think to them it showed N that people weren't interested in disk based games.

Had the 64 been disk based, today's gaming landscape would be totally different. Somewhere along the way Nintendo went from being a forward thinking company to a sideways thinking company.

I imagine a disk based 64 would look somewhat similar to a Neo Geo CDZ.

 

When I worked at a used game store back in the day, people would bring in PS1 games that looked like someone put them on the ground and did the twist on them. Amazing!!!

 

It is what it is really. Got some great first-party games out of it, so can't complain (some of which are still considered 'ground-breaking'). Quality, not quantity, as they say.

I think the likes of Zelda, Goldeneye and Mario 64 would've been worse-off running on CD based technology. I'm sure Nintendo were all too aware of this, surely.

I am naturally slightly biased towards the machine, as I did buy one on launch. I'm sure there are a few who are biased towards the PS1 because they ended up with that system first ;-)

 

I don't think any of the games you mentioned would have been any worse off with CD versus Cart. Since the cart was not executable memory and merely storage you don't get any benefit there where resources and code don't take up RAM. So we are mainly talking about a difference in access time and total memory size. From what I've heard few games took advantage of being on a cartridge such as Indiana Jones which is said to stream in assets (textures and models I guess) during gameplay.

As Alchy said, they should have tossed out not just the carts but the main HW too probably. The texture cache is supposed to be pretty bad which is a main reason for the bad textures. Also I heard the microcode related to graphics that was used for most games was fairly poor in general and it wasn't until later that developers could make their own did we see better looking games like Perfect Dark and the Factor 5 Star Wars games.

Who knows what could have been if Nintendo had gone with CD, however if they had kept their very abusive licensing practices going I doubt the result would have been too different. I heard Nintendo raked in cash thanks to developers having to pay them quite alot to get Cartridges produced.

 

that chart is bs i am sure ps2 and xbox did better than what that chart suggest.