My N64's been crashing...

[fearsomepirate]

Has anyone had this problem before? It's been crashing in both Rayman 2 and World Driver Championship. Any ideas why this might be? Is it overheating? Is it just because it's old and crusty?

Edit: I think it overheated. Nothing works in it now.

Edit: Nevermind. The Expansion Pak must have gotten jarred when I moved it last. Pulling it out and putting it back in has gotten things working again.

 

[Dersaidin]

I cant find my N64, I wanted to play smashbros .

GL, but if you cant get it working, theres emulators around as may already be aware. Still, they're not the same

 

[Dresden]

Its a sign from God telling you to invest in a console that wasn't around during the Dark Ages..

 

[fearsomepirate]

Totally works now. I played Rayman 2 for a coupla hours last night. It was definitely the Expansion Pack. So note to retro gamers: if your N64 is flaking out on you, check the Expansion Pack. And a good game is a good game regardless of how many dot products went into making it. ;-)

On another note, I was surprised how good Rayman looks on this machine. For a 64 game, it has pretty good texturing, good animations, a fairly stable framerate (25 fps?) even in high-res mode, and nice lighting/sfx. It really makes me wonder why Conker chugs along at about 15 fps.

 

[soylent]

Its a sign from God telling you to invest in a console that wasn't around during the Dark Ages..

It's ressurection is a sign from god telling you it 'died' for the sins of <insert obscene derrogative term for people who derive satisfaction only from graphics>.

 

[sfried]

On another note, I was surprised how good Rayman looks on this machine. For a 64 game, it has pretty good texturing, good animations, a fairly stable framerate (25 fps?) even in high-res mode, and nice lighting/sfx. It really makes me wonder why Conker chugs along at about 15 fps.

Simple. Conquer does not make use opf the extra RAM.

I would've eanted to see what a delayed and improved Banjo-Tooie would've looked like given it's higher-res graphics from it's predecessor. The ending might also have been better as well.

 

[fearsomepirate]

But if I put Rayman in low-res mode, it still runs fine. Or will it chug if I take out the RAM expansion and put the jumpers back in? This just seems to be a really curious machine (during the PSx/N64 gen, I was playing on a PC with no 3D accelerator card). For example, World Driver Championship has great geometry and texturing, some nice lighting and "reflections," doesn't use dithering, and runs at a smooth framerate. But other games just barely even manage to run despite having much inferior graphics. I guess this machine must have been insanely difficult to program, because the games are so incredibly disparate in performance.

 

[ERP]

But if I put Rayman in low-res mode, it still runs fine. Or will it chug if I take out the RAM expansion and put the jumpers back in? This just seems to be a really curious machine (during the PSx/N64 gen, I was playing on a PC with no 3D accelerator card). For example, World Driver Championship has great geometry and texturing, some nice lighting and "reflections," doesn't use dithering, and runs at a smooth framerate. But other games just barely even manage to run despite having much inferior graphics. I guess this machine must have been insanely difficult to program, because the games are so incredibly disparate in performance.

It's an odd machine, which is extremly easy to screw yourself on.

It was really short on memory bandwidth and the memory latency was hideous given the CPU speed.

For example at one point we were trying to submit a game, we transitioned from the debug library to the release library and the game slowed down by 20% because it moved code enough to cause the cache to thrash during rendering. I was forced to spend 2 days messing with link order and module layout to get the performance back.

The libraries also varied wildly in performance over its lifetime.

World driver isn't a fair comparison to most games, we had uCode tools and Docs when we wrote it, very few dev houses ever did (and most wouldn't have spent the time if they had). It also runs without the ZBuffer to reduce the bandwidth to a point where we could push that amount of stuff without it getting pulled down to a crawl.

FWIW I think Stunt Racer 64 looks better, but that has more to do with the artists having a better handle on how to do things with the engine.

 

[fearsomepirate]

You worked on WDC? Well, then let me personally congratulate you (and whomever else you worked with) on a job well done. Of the 10 N64 games I've obtained since I got an N64 a year ago or so, this is one of the few that I think has really held up over time. And like I said, I didn't play N64 back in the day, so I don't have any nostalgia for these games. Oh, and I liked how WDC's cars were rather thinly veiled versions of real cars.

Is uCode microcode? If that's the case, I'm still surprised Rare couldn't get Conker running at a halfway decent framerate. It's not like it looks fantastically better than Rayman 2. I knew about the bandwidth and latency issues, but the variance with libraries is something I didn't know about. I wonder if it would be possible to mod a machine to use better memory.

 

[ERP]

You worked on WDC? Well, then let me personally congratulate you (and whomever else you worked with) on a job well done. Of the 10 N64 games I've obtained since I got an N64 a year ago or so, this is one of the few that I think has really held up over time. And like I said, I didn't play N64 back in the day, so I don't have any nostalgia for these games. Oh, and I liked how WDC's cars were rather thinly veiled versions of real cars.

Is uCode microcode? If that's the case, I'm still surprised Rare couldn't get Conker running at a halfway decent framerate. It's not like it looks fantastically better than Rayman 2. I knew about the bandwidth and latency issues, but the variance with libraries is something I didn't know about. I wonder if it would be possible to mod a machine to use better memory.

Yes I worked on WDC.

uCode is infact microcode.

I don't believe Rare ever did anything drastic with the uCode, I know they made some changes to th lighting model, but I don't believe they departed radically from where it started, for WDC I more or less rewrote the uCode from scratch.

I think that conkers frame rate probably had more to do with Rare not putting much stock in framerate more than anything else. I don't have inside information from Rare , but my guess would be that they have tools that put a lot of the control in the hands of the artists. It's a double edged sword, it usually means better looking games but without good metrics reporting it usually also means bad framerate.

 

[Guden Oden]

Most Rare games on N64 had pretty terrible framerate. Banjo-tooie had some parts where the FPS dropped through the floor for simply no reason whatsoever, like you were standing in some corner next to a hut and looking at a wall. Probably overdraw issues or something.

Original banjo was probably their smoothest title overall, and it did have some pretty neat gfx and even dual-textured certain surfaces. Too bad they screwed it up later on. Banjo-kazooie was a great game with some neat levels and gameplay (though frustrating at times), let down by a crappy name and two even crappier main characters. Meh. The dynamic music system was incredible btw.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Any other standouts on N64 I should look for? I have F-Zero X, Ridge Racer 64, Rogue Squadron, Resident Evil 2, and Excite Bike...I also have Goldeneye, PD, Conker and Jet Force Gemini, but I didn't really like any of them.

 

[Dresden]

It's ressurection is a sign from god telling you it 'died' for the sins of <insert obscene derrogative term for people who derive satisfaction only from graphics>.

The word you're looking for is "Jim Norton types."

 

[Guden Oden]

Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Mario64 and Banjo-Kazooie are all quite nice. Turok is one of the most unique FPSes ever made gameplay-wise IMO; perhaps as much a strike of accidental genius as George Lucas' original Star Wars movie. Especially considering the devs never managed to repeat their feat.