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Nintendo PlayStation...so, apparently someone has one.
- Thread starter alr1ght
- Start date
Lol I think those points are pretty much irrelevant as I'm sure those games were probably going to be produced regardless
Which department of Sony are they currently being stored in? Does he know this? Could somebody ask him? I might be of some assistance if he is able to be more specific.
Chittagong
Gold Member
Edit: also, we've seen some official hardware pics with minor variations but someone's found a pic of the exact same unit this guy found:
What the what?! I never knew there was another official pic of the unit, the only pic we have ever seen is the one from the Sony history book, which has no cartridge in it. This pic is all new to me.
Interceptor
Banned
Loving the stuff about Virtual Reality devices. This could be published in 2015 with minor changes and no one would notice anything. ^^
Someone else on reddit has seen it in person. He hasn't provided any new info though, just took his picture with it.
Weltall Zero
Member
Are you suggesting they would have gone bankrupt if they had used optical media for the N64? That might be the funniest thing I've read all week.
Also, I loved cartridges on the Gamecube and especially their most successful console, the Wii.
I didn't say anything about optical media, at all.Are you suggesting they would have gone bankrupt if they had used optical media for the N64? That might be the funniest thing I've read all week.
Also, I loved cartridges on the Gamecube and especially their most successful console, the Wii.
It's 2015 and people are still debating the N64 going with carts instead of CD, lol
There were games only possible on cart. There were games only possible with CD. Without carts we would have never gotten the N64 games we did, nor the Playstation games we did.
People tend to forget consoles were at one time innovative and had strengths and weaknesses not shared with their competitors.
There were games only possible on cart. There were games only possible with CD. Without carts we would have never gotten the N64 games we did, nor the Playstation games we did.
People tend to forget consoles were at one time innovative and had strengths and weaknesses not shared with their competitors.
Theonik
Member
There isn't much you can do with carts that you can't on CD. Was there much if any N64 games with custom hardware on the carts?
Well, as long as we're not using nutjob rhetoric to back up our opin-
I'm...pretty sure that by 1996, there was nothing innovative about going with ROM cartridges.
Games with very large worlds could practically stream into the console's RAM; something that a CD-based system would have a very hard time doing because the format is so monumentally slow.
For example, many of the cutscenes in Banjo-Tooie would have to be pre-rendered on the PS1 because it would be mental trying to load all those different locations in real-time with 30-second long load times (or worse) inbetween. The N64 however could do them effortlessly because the time it takes to load levels and environments is practically instantaneous.
And of course, you can save data on the cart itself, a memory card was not a required accessory for games unless the developer/publisher wanted to.
D.Lo
Member
Nonsense.
1) Carts with lockout chips had effectively zero piracy, vs almost ubiquitous piracy of CD consoles (PS1 is the most pirated console of all time, equal to the DS in my experience). DS piracy ended up happening because SD cards became the 'new CDs' in that sense.
2) Carts have almost non-existent load times without any compromise in game design (e.g. bare load rooms/corridors like in Castlevania SOTN or Soul Reaver or Metroid Prime which interrupt a seamless game world). Very important in certain genres. Load times in random RPG battles were ultra-infuriating, same with 2D fighting games (nobody's playing Saturn or Neo Geo CD versions of King of Fighters these days, are they?)
3) Dynamic music that morphs and changes based on scene, well utilised in Banjo Kazooie. It can be done on PS1, but even for chip music would waste lots of RAM if not from a super-fast cart bus.
4) No moving parts make consoles much more reliable. My PS1 had to be turned on its side to play games. Many older CD consoles simply do not work anymore, yet a 40 year old Atari more than likely does.
5) CD drives were not free. Back then a decent speed CD drive would add at least $50 to a console's price - see $200+ PCE CD and Mega CD add-on prices for reference. Nintendo sacrificed CD for extra power in the N64, which sold at the same price as competitors but was significantly more powerful.
Carts for N64 turned out to be the wrong decision, the benefits were outweighed by the negatives. But it wasn't a completely stupid decision at the time either, and it's factually wrong to say carts have literally no advantages.
0.1.1.2.3.5.8.13.21.34.55
Banned
I've got a Panasonic tv from 1989 that's got s-video.
It took a while for mass adoption, but s-vids been around for a while.
What games were only possible on cart? Most of the big Rare games for N64 will be on disc in less than a month. I even have OoT on a disc for Gamecube. I can't think of any games that are only possible on cart.
Okay, but its still possible without a cart. The poster said the games are "not possible".
CalamityPixel
Member
I just want someone to find a suitable plug and see what happens when this thing boots up.
Sapiens
Member
Some Nintendo fans are a special kind of dedicated.
Not worth the risk unless it's opened and the circuitry is checked out first.
Diablohead
Member
yeah i'm interested in what happens on boot up, will we get a regular snes kind of boot or will we get something akin to the mega cd with it's custom music and cd checking timer before it boots into a game of any kind.
D.Lo
Member
True. If Nintendo put 43MB of 2.6GB/second RAM like the Gamecube had in the N64 it could have run Ocarina off a disc, no problem. It would also have cost $5000 in 1995.
Dreamwriter
Member
Agreed! I've never been one to collect things and not try them out, in fact if I had one of these I'd try to program a new game for it, even if only I could ever play it.
You forget that there were some streamed-world games on PSX, such as Soul Reaver
That's a very funny example to use because that game is loaded into GC's RAM in its entirety before start precisely because it can't run off discs, not even the (relatively) fast pseudo-DVDs GC used.
Okay, so it would cost a lot. But its still possible without being on a cart. "Not possible" means it could never work at all unless it was on a cartridge.
I don't know man. That cheap ass yellowing plastic is very reminiscent early era consoles.
This is a bad way to back yourself into a corner. At no point would people have done what was needed to make it possible back during that generation; much like no console maker decided to make the PS4 or Xbox One 4k compatible for games this generation; sure it's possible, but it would be priced so high it would be a disaster.
The access times were overwhelmingly lower on carts while CDs had a similar advantage in space. There definitely were certain things you couldn't do on one medium over another beyond vastly different loading times.
For example the context driven ability to have music change on the fly depending on the enemy you were fighting or an achievement being unlocked was dramatically easier on cartridges than CDs.
[EGM often sarcastic, sometimes interesting]
Somewhere around the late 90s EGM had a feature of Nintendo 64's Bulky Drive (64DD) but there they also looked back on the Nintendo Disc for SNES.
Been searching for this very page but this morning I saw it on assembler and cropped it a bit.
(early 90s EGM)
Somewhere around the late 90s EGM had a feature of Nintendo 64's Bulky Drive (64DD) but there they also looked back on the Nintendo Disc for SNES.
Been searching for this very page but this morning I saw it on assembler and cropped it a bit.
(early 90s EGM)
vagabondarts
Member
Reminds me of UMD. I wonder how pissed off NCL was when they first laid eyes on PSP UMD format.
sixteen-bit
Member
vagabondarts
Member
I did! :0
test_account
XP-39C²
I also remember that friend had an external CD-ROM (i think it was 3x speed) where you had to put the disc into a plastic case before inserting it into the drive
This was in the mid 90s.Throwaway123456789
Member
Err. You can fit ALL of Rare's games from the period combined into the main memory of the Xbox One. The PS1 had 2MB. There is literally 4000 times more ram in the Xbone.
Yes, it's possible now, but at the time it really wasn't feasible at all.
The feeling I had when my SGI Indy arrived at my home, a workstation from the 90s, with a processor better than an n64 but also 64 bit mips. It was glorious, two friends were visiting my home when I turned it on... We were blown away! I hope this is as good.
boyshine
Member
Reminds me even more of the CD-ROM caddy drives for PC. My first CD-ROM drive used those.
WickedCobra03
Member
Companies were still doing this in the late 90's and early 2000's. I didn't mind the concept, but it was just weird that we just kept bringing cartridges back in the form and function of new technology any way we could. I had a DVD-RAM drive, it was pretty neat for being high capacity and on-demand read and write capability.I also remember that friend had an external CD-ROM (i think it was 3x speed) where you had to put the disc into a plastic case before inserting it into the drive
Theonik
Member
Right, I said not much, not that there isn't any situation where faster access times are favourable over slow disks. Mind, the cutscenes being real time in the example you mentioned is exactly the kind of thing I would consider pretty minor since you got a ton of space on a CD you could waste to do just that.
I was actually pondering that earlier. I think I'd have liked if those were the optical media standard. So many scratched CDs could have been saved.
wanderingprostheyltite
Member
lol someone at assembler is saying the guy should lawyer up and contact Ninty directly to get a writ that they're "releasing" it to him. If he did that wouldn't they just want it destroyed? Seems like dumb and paranoid advice.
LuigiBlood
Member
Honestly even I think it's bullshit to do that. The guy even just registered to say this kind of shit.
Anyway the Dan is taking his time and is in talks with people to check it out before plugging it in and stuff like that. So I guess it should be fine.
The person I was responding to said it was not possible. Not that it wasn't feasible. Feasible and possible are two very different things.
Diablohead
Member
This makes me want to believe that someone out there has a dreamcast dvd player and VMU mp3 player, two things I would drool over before the dreamcast was stopped.
Lupin the Third
Member
Someone earlier on this page said the only known photo of the SFC PlayStation didn't have a cartridge in it, but it totally does. It's kind of a blob that sits in the SFC cart slot and its labeled "Super Disc System Cartridge" which means it's probably required for operation in some way (SFC part probably still needs it to see the CD drive like on the add-on CD configuration, and it also contains extra RAM and processors).
LuigiBlood
Member
I like to think it's pretty similar to the Satellaview, the main cartridge that serves as lobby, the BS-X, has pretty much a bunch of functions available for the downloaded games.
They could have included it in the Satellaview itself, but the SNES' EXT plug doesn't allow anything to run from that. It needs a cartridge.
That Super Disc System Cartridge is probably the demo cartridge Dan owns. Might have some interface thing going on
EDIT:
Also, the SNES PlayStation design was patented in 1991, but the Nintendo Disk was patented in 1993. I think the Super Disc isn't the Nintendo Disk and might be something else.
In fact, most rumors about specs of the SNES CD are only about the specs of Philips' SNES CD, and also the Philips & Sony one.
We actually know next to nothing about the Sony one, other than what it looks like, how the development ADDON looks like, and a few games (the disc he has might be Forteza?).
Weltall Zero
Member
Then what the hell are you talking about? Did you even read what I was replying to?
mightynine
Member
I've seen that Super Disc logo before - wasn't it just something Sony labeled their disc drives back then?
It's all speculation of course, but it's quite possible that N64 games could have been quite different, as the early 3D era involved a lot of experimentation and building on other games and ideas that worked. Goldeneye was influenced by Mario 64, but if Mario 64 doesn't release close enough to the film's release date, than Goldeneye ends up being a very different game. It's pretty safe to say that by the seventh generation, it's fairly unlikely that there would be many games that bear much resemblance to the games as we know them, if there even is a seventh generation.
Throwaway123456789
Member
It's possible to use a catapult to travel to Spain for the holidays too. You know what he meant.
Today's disc drives have much, much higher bandwidth and lower latency than the PS1 drive, and also the fact that every game on the One and PS4 actually runs from the hard drive.
There's also the fact that modern consoles have enough RAM that they can just load the entire N64 ROM into RAM, which will be faster than even streaming from the HDD. While OoT performs fine on GameCube, Majora's Mask has issues because there wasn't enough fast RAM space to load the entire Majora ROM into RAM. When you're playing OoT on GameCube, it's not even using the disc drive after the initial load.
edit: PS1 had a 2x CD ROM drive. The real world bandwidth was roughly 100-200kb/sec for PS1 games. For N64, it was 25-40MB/sec. You traded space for speed. The top speed of N64 cartridges still beats out the disc drive of the One and the PS4. The latency of an N64 cartridge is still lower than the hard drive of a One or PS4.
Most all Nintendo and Rare games on the N64 exploited the near RAM speeds to do level streaming and a whole bunch of tricks. Ocarina of Time loads and deloads entire level segments on the fly when you walk down a hallway in under a second. Banjo-Kazooie has the camera jump into Gruntilda's Lair or another level entirely instantly when it's showing you a hint or a Jiggy being created. On Playstation you'd have to fake it with an FMV or just show a still frame.