Hyrule Field in OOT for the N64.

[mikiex]

An Issue I remember was no additive blending, was it possible and just down to a limitation of our engine using the standard nintendo sdk?

 

[I.S.T.]

I wonder what that RAMBUS RAM cost in '96. This was when most video cards under $300 were packing 1-4MB of EDO or FPM RAM.

True, but consider the lower volumes those cards had...

 

[SgtThom]

The cart on the N64 was really slow to access too, so in addition to other considerations they could have been giving themselves time to stream in new data with large transitional areas.

You only need a few MS to stream any new data to ram. Cartridges(even the slow ones) are more than capable of doing that.

 

[function]

You only need a few MS to stream any new data to ram. Cartridges(even the slow ones) are more than capable of doing that.

The N64 carts were supposed to be extremely slow - it was the first cart system I ever saw with loading times. There were one or two or more second pauses between transitions on lots of N64 stuff. One of the devs here even stated that the Playstation CD-Rom drive could be faster under certain conditions. It'd be interesting to know what its latency and transfer bandwidth were. I doubt it could flush and re-load all the environment assets within a few ms.

The way Hyrule field was broken up meant you could guarantee a reasonable amount of time between seeing all the parts of the field, even at lowest lod, and even on a galloping horse going round close to the ranch. Such spaced out viewing wouldn't be necessary for rendering load purposes alone, but perhaps it was just coincidental.

 

[TapamN]

A few SNES game had load times. Out of This World and Earthworm Jim come to mind; Earthworm Jim had longer load times on the SNES than Sega CD. The load times didn't come from slow cartridge access; it was from heavy compression. Some NES games, like the Ikari Warriors port by Micronics had 2 second load times; you can watch them decompress graphics into video RAM with an emulator.

I remember hearing somewhere that N64 cartridges were over 15 times faster than the PlayStation's CD drive, so they're probably around 4500kb/sec sustained. Plus vastly better random access than any CD. But still very, very slow when compared to the N64's RAM.

 

[swaaye]

A few N64 games streamed video off of the cart. Resident Evil 2 used a lot of that. But I'm sure it was highly compressed for the cart and very low bitrate. Also, a Factor 5 interview about Indiana Jones comes to mind - they said they used continuous streaming. It does sound like it took some ingenuity to make this work though, as with everything else on N64.