Why weren't there more 2d titles for the N64?

Something I've always wondered about is the lack of 2d titles for the 64.

Was this some policy by Nintendo or was it due to the hardware handling true 2d(sprites) poorly? And what games beyond MK3 were 3d? Were there any other sprite based games in development?

 

Piss poor T-MEM is the main culpret. The n64 was just not built with 2D in mind at all. Hell many 3d games suffered as well due to this flaw (a long with nintendo being so stingy on microcode development).

This is why games like mario64 on DS look nicer then mario64 on the n64 even tho the n64 is still much more powerful.

 

As Subbie said, the N64 was just not well suited for 2D games. While the easiest thing to do if you have 3D rendering capability would be to make flat (2D plains) polygons and use that for drawing your sprites and backgrounds, the N64 has some tiny ass texture memory that I recall gives you about 64x64 pixels. And so as I remember its a huge bottleneck and pain in the ass. Otherwise the N64 would have been perfect for those 2D arcade games that needed lots of memory and with superior access time that CDs didn't offer. Plus I think with that Expansion Pak the N64 had quite alot more memory than either the PSX or Saturn (without RAM cart).

 

While carts do have space issues you were right on the ram part. The n64 had tons of main ram (4MB) and with expansion was boosted to 8MB which is insane for the time (ps1 had 2MB ram, 1MB vram). Another benifit is the n64 main ram was simular to xbox (framebuffers, zbuffers, etc were all in main ram, there was no seperate vram).

Yet again the huge flaw was in the RDP with it's poor t-mem size and bad microcodes. If thies two issues were fixed then you can bet the n64 would have looked much better (games like conker's bad furday would have come alot sooner) as well there would have been more 2D games.

 

Here's another question. Why do N64 games have such poor polygon models? I mean everything looks triagular. I've seen much better character models on a Saturn or PlayStation yet those systems are far weaker (in a sense). Was this another memory issue?

Yakumo

 

Microcode issue. The microcodes were piss poor. If I remember correctly most microcode forced things that would bottleneck the system.

Rare showed what the n64 could do on Conker since it was custom microcode writen from scrach.

 

The N64's polygone producing capabilities is far below the PSX's. However, to my knowledge, it is higher than the Saturn's.

A game like Conker's bad fur day should prove the point - but this is only the finest graphics ever commercially seen on the system!

Also, nothing can (natively) look triangular on the Saturn, since it uses quads, not triangles.

@subbie:

Is DK64, that uses the expansion pak as a standard accessory, technically superior to Banjo-Tooie or Conker in any way? I think Banjo Tooie also used the new microcode.

also, would it be possible to have some kind of extra RAM in the gamepak? I m naturally aware that the PI bus' speed is much lower than the RDRAM, but just curious.

 

I have read (countless) arguments saying the Saturn can actually draw more polygons per second than the N64 and the PS. The N64 is lowest of the three due to Nintendo forcing the higher quality Fast3D microcode.

Some figures (from Wikipedia):

Nintendo64:
Fast3D microcode: < ~100,000 polygons per second
Turbo3D microcode: 500,000–600,000 polygons per second with PlayStation (much lower) quality. Nintendo never allowed this code to be used in shipping games.

PlayStation:
360,000 flat-shaded polygons per second
180,000 texture mapped and light-sourced polygons per second

Sega Saturn:
500,000 flat-shaded polygons per second
200,000 texture mapped polygons per second

 

I find it hard to believe that the Saturn could, actually, pull off such a number of quads. Theoretical numbers is one thing, with Shenmue as the example that comes to mind, but in practice getting that power out there is another theme all together!

'in theory' the PS2 is much more capable than the GameCube, but we all know what to expect from each machine by average.

 

I doubt anyone pulled that off on the Saturn, but those are the figures all over the 'net. Could be fanboy (coughScottHcough) conjecture, but there we go

 

so jim, any idea how these numbers were produced in calculating the potential of the Saturn? I smell optimistic statistics, not a very truthful approach.

As you know, in my country they say "If my grandmother had balls she'd be my grand-father", the point being that she actually doesnt, and hypothesizing on big 'ifs' is not directly comperable to the real-life values used to judge the PSX and n64.

 

Hmm....

anyone got a list of 2D titles that came out on the 64...

So far... I can think of

Paper Mario

 

This is technically not a 2D title... at least not like the OP is asking. It just uses totally flat polygons. (Pretty sure anyway).

 

Ugg, I keep forgetting the Saturn is quad based on triangle based.

Not 2D in any fasion.

Best I can think of are

Wonder Project J 2 (one of the few n64 games to have a huge amount of sprites)
Mortal Kombat
Mischif Makers
Elmo adventures (i think)

 

Mischief Makers was an awesome game.

Subbie, you forget Yoshi's Story! How could u!

Also, Jet Pack and Donkey Kong classic in DK64, as well as the emulated GB/C titles of Pokemon in Pokemon Stadium are 2D in the strictest sense.

Sub-zero mythology cannot be ommited from the list either, along with MK:Trilogy.

You also seem to be forgetting Starcraft and Ogre Battle 64, and I think, Command and Conquer. Tetris Worlds, and Dr. Mario 64 are also 2d. So is Bust-a-move 2 and 3. The Love-sims in japan are 2D as well, including Getter Love. Tamagochi 64 too. the list is not as short as you might believe my friends.

Someone hasn't been paying enough attention to their N64 it seems!

Also, Saturn is quad based, not triangle based. Tomb raider was originally designed with the Saturn in-mind, which put constraints on the game's engine as it migrated and developed on the PSX.

 

Is the N64's shitty 2D capabilities why the HUDs in many games look like shit on emulators or on the virtual console?

 

that's a matter of resolution my friend. You can render polygones at higher resolutions, but you can only stretch and magnify sprites or low-rez textures on plains. You can't actively anti-alias them that easily anyway.

 

Could you not just make two of the quad co-ordinates the same?

 

yes. They key word in my phrase was natively. You can overlap two points to the same coord, but you can imagine what issues that would present for textures, unless you made an abstract layer engine for applying textures in a triangular form (genuinely) without tracing the original shape based on coords. That abstraction layer would be too 'costly' processing-wise for the saturn to impliment on a large scale. It would also produce poor results because you d have to sync your coords->abstract layer->textures for every change of angle (not to mention dynamic lights etc)

Another thing you can do is bring 2 out of 4 points of a quad next to each-other instead of overlapping them. This would avoid the 'folding' effect , which usually gives rise to priority issues regarding the textures (Since they're folded and the machine can't decide which of the two folds takes priority)

This would also require having specialized trapezic-shaped textures for those areas.