00:00SPEAKER$300 Apple TV.
00:03SPEAKER- What?
00:04SPEAKER- What are we doing, man?
00:05SPEAKERWait, did you not hear?
00:06SPEAKER- It's $300?
00:08SPEAKER- You didn't see that?
00:09SPEAKER- I have been busy this week.
00:10SPEAKER- That's all anybody has taught, yes.
00:12SPEAKERThey finally announced the new Apple television.
00:15SPEAKERI think it's been literally about a year
00:16SPEAKERsince the rumor was like,
00:18SPEAKER"Hey, they've got it ready to go.
00:19SPEAKERThey're gonna announce it any day now."
00:20SPEAKERI think it was genuinely last fall
00:22SPEAKERthat those rumors started.
00:23SPEAKERAnd a year later, here we are.
00:25SPEAKER- How much RAM is in that thing, man?
00:27SPEAKER- They don't know yet.
00:28SPEAKERI think that's one of those things
00:29SPEAKERthat they either need to tear it down
00:30SPEAKERonce it's out or maybe that'll show up
00:33SPEAKERin Apple SDKs somehow.
00:35SPEAKERI think they're guessing eight gigabytes now.
00:37SPEAKER- Look, I was too busy making fun
00:38SPEAKERof the Apple Watch for your house.
00:40SPEAKER- Wait, what?
00:41SPEAKER- Do you not see that, the home screen
00:44SPEAKERor whatever it's called?
00:44SPEAKER- I saw a video going around of people saying
00:46SPEAKERthis was the worst product announcement
00:48SPEAKERvideo Apple has ever done.
00:50SPEAKER- It doesn't look great.
00:53SPEAKERUsually I can tell, I use the wife judgment
00:55SPEAKERwhen they announce new things
00:56SPEAKERand she's like, "This one looks stupid."
00:58SPEAKERI was like, "Yeah, I think you're probably right."
00:59SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
01:01SPEAKERBut $300 Apple TV.
01:03SPEAKERI don't know, man.
01:04SPEAKER- Does it do like 8K or something?
01:06SPEAKERWhat are you getting for 300 bucks?
01:07SPEAKERMine was 150 bucks when I bought it.
01:09SPEAKERI thought that was expensive.
01:10SPEAKER- You're getting like three microphones
01:12SPEAKERup from zero on the previous models
01:14SPEAKERand a bunch of AI features.
01:15SPEAKERLike that seems to be the focus.
01:17SPEAKER- Oh no, I don't want that.
01:19SPEAKER- It's got an A19, which is nice.
01:21SPEAKERI mean, that's a nice modern ship.
01:23SPEAKERLike I'm sure it'll be nice and speedy.
01:24SPEAKERIt's got AV1 decode.
01:25SPEAKERIt's like the one other technical feature
01:29SPEAKERthat people like us might care about.
01:31SPEAKERBut most of the extra costs seems to have gone
01:33SPEAKERinto the microphones and the AI processing.
01:35SPEAKER- I don't want that.
01:36SPEAKER- No.
01:37SPEAKER- I don't want any of those things.
01:38SPEAKER- Nope, it still does the exact same video output, 4K 60.
01:40SPEAKERLike it doesn't have any new audio format support
01:43SPEAKERthat people know as far as people can tell.
01:44SPEAKERLike it's almost entirely AI stuff.
01:47SPEAKER- It doesn't do like 4K 120?
01:48SPEAKER- Nope, still 4K 60 output.
01:50SPEAKER- Ew.
01:51SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:54SPEAKER- It's stinky.
01:55SPEAKERI'm just sitting here thinking about what I would...
01:58SPEAKERLike I love my Apple TV.
02:01SPEAKERI love not being part of the surveillance capitalism state
02:04SPEAKERwhen I'm watching, or as much as you can be
02:05SPEAKERwhen I'm watching TV.
02:07SPEAKERAnd 300 bucks seems like more than,
02:11SPEAKERlike the balance of not being surveilled versus $300.
02:16SPEAKERRoku's looking pretty good, man.
02:18SPEAKER(upbeat music)
02:24SPEAKER(upbeat music)
02:46SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Check Pod.
02:49SPEAKERI'm Will.
02:50SPEAKER- I'm Brad.
02:51SPEAKERI might follow up on the cold open
02:53SPEAKERand say if you don't love surveillance,
02:58SPEAKERmaybe Roku is not the place to look either.
02:59SPEAKER- No, don't go, I was making a joke.
03:01SPEAKERLike Roku's bad.
03:02SPEAKERRoku's bad.
03:04SPEAKERGoogle TV seems bad.
03:06SPEAKER- Yeah.
03:07SPEAKER- Tizen just seems bad in every way you can imagine.
03:12SPEAKER- Web OS, forget about it.
03:13SPEAKER- Yeah, no, thank you, sir.
03:15SPEAKERI'm just gonna go back to watching my TV over analog.
03:18SPEAKEROh, wait.
03:20SPEAKER- I'm gonna go back to playing video games
03:21SPEAKERon cartridges in 1996.
03:23SPEAKER- Oh, hell yeah, you are.
03:26SPEAKERSeptember 29th, 1996, a couple of weeks ago and 30 years,
03:30SPEAKERmarks the North American launch of the Nintendo 64.
03:34SPEAKERWe talked about it a little bit a couple of weeks ago.
03:36SPEAKER- Yeah, on the patron episode, it came up.
03:37SPEAKERI think it was, it might've been the anniversary
03:40SPEAKERwhen we recorded that.
03:41SPEAKER- We recorded on the anniversary, yeah.
03:43SPEAKER- Yeah, and that kind of got us thinking
03:44SPEAKERabout the heady days of the Nintendo 64's launch.
03:49SPEAKER- Yeah, it's funny, in a lot of ways this was kind of
03:52SPEAKERthe end of the consoles being different hardware, right?
03:55SPEAKERI mean, I guess a lot of the consoles were MIPS hardware
03:58SPEAKERat that point, but when you got to the next generation
04:01SPEAKERand really the generation, I guess-
04:04SPEAKER- Oh, you're right, you're right.
04:05SPEAKERThe PlayStation was also MIPS, I believe, the first one.
04:08SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, but I guess they were,
04:12SPEAKERI guess from this point on, the hardware stopped
04:15SPEAKERbeing more different and started being more of the same.
04:17SPEAKER- Yeah, or maybe another way to put it is,
04:19SPEAKERthis is kind of the start of consoles
04:20SPEAKERlooking more like computers, where they have-
04:23SPEAKER- That's probably right.
04:24SPEAKER- They have frame buffers, they, like the games are developed
04:26SPEAKERin a higher level language rather than assembly.
04:28SPEAKERLike they are doing more PC-like things under the hood
04:32SPEAKERinstead of just the classic like racing the beam,
04:34SPEAKERwriting everything in machine code.
04:36SPEAKER- Yeah, they started using like more common APIs,
04:40SPEAKERlike OpenGL and stuff like that, not universally Sony,
04:45SPEAKERbut yeah, it was, they became more PC-like
04:50SPEAKERis probably the right way to put it.
04:52SPEAKER- So I think like the upshot of this episode
04:54SPEAKERis basically like thinking about the N64's anniversary
04:57SPEAKERkind of got us curious about the guts of the N64.
05:00SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause it kind of predated Digital Foundry.
05:02SPEAKERWe didn't know how this thing worked back then, you know?
05:04SPEAKER- Kind of predated the web for most people.
05:07SPEAKER- Yeah, and it was before, this was from the era
05:11SPEAKERof yelling at people about consoles on the internet,
05:14SPEAKERbut not really understanding what, how they worked
05:16SPEAKERbecause they were pretty opaque still in a lot of ways.
05:19SPEAKER- There was a fair amount of yelling on Usenet
05:21SPEAKERgoing on at this time, but not many people were there.
05:24SPEAKER- Yeah, no, no.
05:25SPEAKER- But yes, the console wars were hot and heavy
05:27SPEAKERat this point.
05:28SPEAKERI really, I think this is, I learned a lot looking
05:31SPEAKERthrough the information for this episode
05:33SPEAKERand really, I feel like this is really appropriate to do
05:36SPEAKERbecause the hype around the N64's hardware
05:39SPEAKERwas so extreme at the time with the involvement of SGI
05:42SPEAKERand names like Project Reality, you know?
05:46SPEAKERLike the hype around like the tech demos they put out,
05:48SPEAKERyou know, like Squaresoft did that Final Fantasy tech demo
05:51SPEAKERvery early that came out that people lost their minds over.
05:54SPEAKERAnd also, you know, like it was just,
05:56SPEAKERit was really heady transformative time
05:58SPEAKERfor moving from 2D to 3D graphics.
06:00SPEAKERStuff was happening on the PC at the same time.
06:02SPEAKERLike there was a lot of hype,
06:04SPEAKERa lot of change going on at this time.
06:07SPEAKERAnd so like looking at what we're gonna do here
06:09SPEAKERis just kind of look and do a broad overview
06:10SPEAKERof how the N64 works under the hood.
06:12SPEAKERAnd that was pretty edifying to like just look
06:15SPEAKERat the nuts and bolts of what it actually is.
06:17SPEAKER- Yeah, it's funny 'cause there was a lot of stuff in there.
06:19SPEAKERSo SGI was, like people knew about SGI
06:22SPEAKERbecause of movies like Jurassic Park and Toy Story, right?
06:24SPEAKERWe had seen these big CG movies
06:28SPEAKERthat were impossible to make years before
06:31SPEAKERand they were powered by these big, you know,
06:33SPEAKERquarter of a million dollar workstation,
06:36SPEAKERsupercomputer workstations that SGI was making.
06:39SPEAKERAnd SGI was shipping 3D accelerators basically five years
06:43SPEAKERbefore anybody else in these big workstations.
06:46SPEAKER- But like you said, like bespoke and made
06:48SPEAKERfor kind of industrial commercial applications
06:50SPEAKERwith consistent, you know, prices consistent
06:54SPEAKERwith those use cases attached.
06:56SPEAKER- I mean, they weren't handmade chips,
06:58SPEAKERbut they were bespoke handmade chips
07:00SPEAKERfor all intents and purposes.
07:01SPEAKER- Right, like the SGI name was like pretty out there, right?
07:03SPEAKERLike this is getting long enough to know
07:05SPEAKERthat I'm like, it's a little bit hard for me to remember now,
07:07SPEAKERbut like that was kind of the name you saw attached
07:10SPEAKERto like your Terminator 2s and The Abyss
07:12SPEAKERand Jurassic Park, right?
07:14SPEAKER- Yeah, when you saw like making,
07:16SPEAKERif you were the kind of person who watched the making
07:18SPEAKERof specials that were on like HBO and in some cases,
07:22SPEAKEReven like network TV for movies like Jurassic Park
07:25SPEAKERand The Abyss, you saw them talking about workstations
07:28SPEAKERthat were SGI workstations.
07:30SPEAKERThey may not have called them SGI,
07:31SPEAKERbut SGI, when Nintendo announced that they were working
07:35SPEAKERwith SGI to make the graphics chip for the,
07:39SPEAKER'cause we didn't call them GPUs back then.
07:41SPEAKERIt was a graphics chip for the N64.
07:44SPEAKER- Although I just want to put a pin in that statement
07:46SPEAKERbecause I think there is like an argument
07:47SPEAKERthat this thing kind of had
07:48SPEAKERthe first commercial consumer GPU in it.
07:51SPEAKER- It fits a lot of the definition for the GPU
07:55SPEAKERthat Nvidia established when they coined the term
07:57SPEAKERin like 2003.
07:58SPEAKER- Yeah.
08:00SPEAKER- But yeah, so like SGI was a name though,
08:04SPEAKERand people knew it and they were like, oh, this is serious.
08:06SPEAKERThis isn't like, yeah, this isn't like a couple of guys
08:09SPEAKERin the hardware division at Sega figuring out
08:11SPEAKERhow to do texture blitting onto polygons, right?
08:13SPEAKERThis is the real deal.
08:15SPEAKERThis is some heavy duty juice.
08:17SPEAKER- Like arguably the best 3D graphics hardware company
08:19SPEAKERin the world.
08:22SPEAKER- That was shipping anything for sure, yeah, at that time.
08:25SPEAKERAnd at the same time, like we were,
08:27SPEAKERI guess the 3D effects Voodoo was on the cusp
08:30SPEAKERof releasing at this point.
08:31SPEAKER- Yeah, not to, I mean, I don't wanna talk about that era
08:34SPEAKERof PC shooters ad nauseum,
08:36SPEAKER'cause we've talked about that a lot over the years,
08:37SPEAKERbut yes, this is like reading about this reminded me
08:39SPEAKERhow tightly condensed all the big dates,
08:43SPEAKERlike milestone dates for 3D graphics around this time were
08:46SPEAKERbecause like Quake came out in June of this year
08:48SPEAKERand then N64 came out in September
08:50SPEAKERand GL Quake came out in like December.
08:53SPEAKERSo in like the space of like six months,
08:54SPEAKERyou had like all this 3D console stuff going on,
08:57SPEAKERlike the first like true really groundbreaking
09:00SPEAKER3D accelerator on PC, the first landmark PC game to use it.
09:04SPEAKERLike it was a lot going on.
09:06SPEAKER- And at the same time, it was kind of like
09:09SPEAKERthe game industry, especially on Nintendo's side
09:11SPEAKERwas saying goodbye to childish things
09:13SPEAKERand leaving sprites behind,
09:15SPEAKERbecause like this was not a machine designed to,
09:19SPEAKERI mean, it could show sprites and they did,
09:21SPEAKERthere were some 2D games for the N64,
09:23SPEAKERbut for the most part, this was a whole hog dive
09:26SPEAKERinto 3D, the world of 3D.
09:29SPEAKERAnd I feel like Sony and Sega especially didn't do
09:32SPEAKERthat same thing at quite that same level, did they?
09:34SPEAKER- Oh, PlayStation definitely did.
09:35SPEAKERPlayStation was absolutely a 3D first console.
09:38SPEAKER- Okay.
09:39SPEAKER- The Saturn, that is a long thorny history
09:42SPEAKERthat I can't really do justice to here,
09:44SPEAKERbut the Saturn was, the narrative is that the Saturn
09:47SPEAKERwas conceived as a 2D machine
09:49SPEAKERand then kind of laid in the process.
09:51SPEAKERThey sort of panicked and slapped a second CPU into it
09:53SPEAKERto try to help it do 3D.
09:55SPEAKERI mean, I think some people kind of dispute
09:57SPEAKERthat version of historical events,
09:59SPEAKERbut the long and the short of it is the Saturn
10:02SPEAKERwas pretty ill-equipped for 3D
10:03SPEAKERcompared to the PlayStation and N64.
10:06SPEAKER- And the funny thing is in retrospect,
10:09SPEAKERwe've been through multiple waves of like 16-bit console,
10:13SPEAKERboom, nostalgia boom, right?
10:15SPEAKERWhere like, basically the industry tossed out
10:20SPEAKERa perfectly viable art style in favor
10:23SPEAKERof chasing the new hotness.
10:25SPEAKER- Yeah, but I think about that a lot.
10:29SPEAKERI was on a big Mortal Kombat kick for the last little bit.
10:31SPEAKERLike I finally got around to going back
10:33SPEAKERand going through the entire Mortal Kombat Legacy Collection,
10:35SPEAKERthe digital eclipse kind of documentary format thing,
10:41SPEAKERthe Atari 50 style thing.
10:42SPEAKERAnd like going through that really reminded me
10:45SPEAKEReven by the time MK3 came out in '95,
10:48SPEAKERlike, you know, MK1 digitized graphics,
10:51SPEAKERlike that era of digitized sprite art was mind blowing
10:56SPEAKERwithin the space of like three and a half years.
10:58SPEAKEREven that sort of digitized 2D sprite work
11:00SPEAKERhad gotten not just old hat,
11:02SPEAKERbut like started to feel kind of antiquated
11:04SPEAKERcompared to like, you know,
11:05SPEAKERVirtua Fighter was happening by that time
11:07SPEAKERand Tekken and 3D graphics felt like the future.
11:10SPEAKERAnd even MK3 felt a little dated as a 2D game.
11:14SPEAKERLike everybody was going 3D as fast as they could.
11:17SPEAKERAnd that's kind of the beginning of the story
11:19SPEAKERof this console.
11:20SPEAKER- Yeah, and it puts Nintendo in an interesting place
11:24SPEAKER'cause the SNES was, like the SNES came out in what, '91?
11:28SPEAKERSo by the time this started four or five years later,
11:31SPEAKERthis was feeling, it was feeling old.
11:33SPEAKER- Yeah, and there are a little bit of preamble here,
11:34SPEAKERwhich we don't need to get into too much.
11:36SPEAKERAnd the Video Game History Hour,
11:41SPEAKERwhich is the podcast of the Video Game History Foundation
11:43SPEAKERhas a podcast.
11:46SPEAKERI'll try to find it and put it in the show notes.
11:47SPEAKERI've forgotten which episode it is,
11:49SPEAKERbut they've got an episode that did a deep dive
11:51SPEAKERon the economic conditions in Japan in the early '90s
11:54SPEAKERand how that actually fed into the console race.
11:56SPEAKER- Oh.
11:57SPEAKER- Because I think there were economic factors
12:00SPEAKERaround like the rise and fall of consoles at this time
12:03SPEAKERthat people usually discount.
12:04SPEAKERLike they usually, historically,
12:06SPEAKERpeople just look at what games were out
12:08SPEAKERand what the hardware could do.
12:09SPEAKERAnd like, you look at those factors
12:10SPEAKERas to why things were successful or not,
12:12SPEAKERbut there were definitely economic factors
12:14SPEAKERbehind the stuff as well.
12:15SPEAKERSo there was economic stagnation in the early '90s in Japan,
12:20SPEAKERwhich affected Nintendo's fortunes.
12:22SPEAKERThere was also famously the CD-ROM dust ups that happened
12:25SPEAKERwhere they had a deal with Sony to produce a CD-ROM
12:28SPEAKERthat fell apart.
12:29SPEAKERAnd that famously led to the PlayStation's creation.
12:32SPEAKERThey also had a deal with Phillips.
12:33SPEAKER- For the SNES, right?
12:34SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, sorry for the SNES CD-ROM.
12:36SPEAKERThey also had a deal with Phillips to do a CD-ROM.
12:38SPEAKERThat fell apart as well.
12:39SPEAKERSo they went through a dalliance with CD-ROMs
12:42SPEAKERthat never came to fruition.
12:43SPEAKER- Wait, is that how we got the CDI?
12:45SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't know.
12:47SPEAKERIt is how we got the very questionable CDI Zelda games.
12:51SPEAKERApparently Phillips retained enough rights to Zelda
12:53SPEAKERfrom that collapsed deal
12:55SPEAKERthat they could make those two awful Zelda games.
12:57SPEAKER- God.
12:58SPEAKER- Anyway, that brings me to one of the big revelations I had
13:03SPEAKERabout the formation of the N64 looking into this stuff,
13:06SPEAKERwhich is that it started with SGI, not with Nintendo,
13:08SPEAKERwhich is the opposite of what I had always assumed.
13:12SPEAKERLike I had always assumed- - Wow, really?
13:13SPEAKER- Yeah, like I had always assumed
13:15SPEAKERyou don't intend to look at the marketplace
13:17SPEAKERand saw PlayStation is big, 3D and arcades is big.
13:21SPEAKER3D is obviously the future.
13:23SPEAKERWe need to go really big.
13:24SPEAKERWe need to find like the coolest 3D partner we can find.
13:27SPEAKERHow about SGI?
13:28SPEAKERIt was actually the other way around,
13:30SPEAKERwhich is to say that SGI was looking to expand
13:33SPEAKERinto the consumer market.
13:35SPEAKERAnd so they started redesigning some of their CPUs
13:39SPEAKERto be much cheaper to manufacture.
13:42SPEAKERAnd that they were the ones that,
13:43SPEAKERthey were the ones that reduced costs on their CPUs
13:46SPEAKERand then started going out looking for partners
13:47SPEAKERin the video game space
13:48SPEAKERto expand into high volume consumer sales.
13:51SPEAKER- So they made the MIPS 4300i?
13:53SPEAKER- Yes.
13:55SPEAKER- Oh, I didn't know that.
13:56SPEAKERWell, NEC manufactured it, I know.
13:58SPEAKER- Yeah.
13:59SPEAKER- But I didn't know that they did the design.
14:01SPEAKERThat's fascinating.
14:02SPEAKER- So apparently SGI owned the MIPS instruction set
14:04SPEAKERat this time, which I never realized.
14:06SPEAKERBut this is, so we're referencing a couple of things here.
14:09SPEAKERWikipedia obviously has aggregated a lot of information here
14:11SPEAKERand then Rodrigo Capetti, who runs a--
14:16SPEAKER- It's like a homebrew,
14:18SPEAKERa low level homebrew developer blog, basically.
14:22SPEAKER- Yeah, he's got an index called,
14:23SPEAKERthe series is just called Architecture of Consoles.
14:26SPEAKERIt's pretty straightforward,
14:27SPEAKERbut he has done deep dives on NES and Master System,
14:30SPEAKERall the 16-bit machines, handhelds,
14:32SPEAKERand then getting into the Saturn PlayStation N64.
14:35SPEAKERAnd even later, in fact--
14:37SPEAKER- Yeah, he goes all the way up to the eighth gen.
14:39SPEAKER- Yeah, he actually, you can read about the Wii U
14:42SPEAKERjust about every, except for maybe
14:44SPEAKERthe most recent consoles on here, but--
14:47SPEAKER- It's a fascinating resource.
14:48SPEAKERLike, the depth of, so basically we're coming out
14:52SPEAKERfrom two different sides, right?
14:53SPEAKEROne is the mainstream knowledge,
14:55SPEAKERthe other is what the homebrew community has learned
14:56SPEAKERabout this machine over the years
14:58SPEAKERby building homebrew software.
15:00SPEAKERAnd the N64 has had a lot of homebrew software
15:03SPEAKERbuilt for it over the years, it turns out.
15:05SPEAKER- Yeah, so anyway, just to close the loop
15:07SPEAKERon the SGI expansion stuff,
15:08SPEAKERyeah, that is per Wikipedia that it started
15:12SPEAKERas a business case on the SGI side
15:14SPEAKERthat they wanted to expand into consumer.
15:15SPEAKERAnd so they took the R4000 CPU, which is MIPS-based,
15:21SPEAKERand got it from a unit cost of $200 down to about $40.
15:26SPEAKERAnd then, yeah, they started talking to game console makers.
15:28SPEAKERAnd in fact, they talked to Sega first.
15:31SPEAKERThey first pitched Tom Kalinske,
15:33SPEAKERwho was the famous '90s head of Sega of America, on it.
15:38SPEAKERAnd then before they ended up going to Nintendo.
15:41SPEAKER- So the other thing that I didn't see mentioned
15:43SPEAKERwhen I was reading about this is that at this period in time,
15:48SPEAKERit was unclear if console gaming was gonna last, right,
15:52SPEAKERin the market. - You think?
15:53SPEAKERI'll hear that argument.
15:55SPEAKER- Stuff was selling, right?
15:57SPEAKERBut when you talk to the business folks,
15:59SPEAKERthere were questions whether it was heading
16:01SPEAKERin front of their boom, whether the increase in spend
16:03SPEAKERon an unheard of expensive $200, $250 console
16:08SPEAKERwas the harbinger of doom and another Atari 2600 crash
16:13SPEAKERfor the games industry.
16:15SPEAKERAnd I mean, part of that was that the people
16:20SPEAKERwho wrote about business and talked about business stuff
16:22SPEAKERhad no idea what was driving game sale.
16:25SPEAKERThey didn't play, this was firmly in the era of video games,
16:29SPEAKERthey're for the kids, not video games are a thing
16:32SPEAKERthat literally almost every human on earth plays, right?
16:35SPEAKER- Okay, sure, that is very fair.
16:36SPEAKERIt was absolutely still seen as a market
16:39SPEAKERfor adolescent boys by mainstream at this time.
16:42SPEAKER- And they were looking at things like the declining sales
16:47SPEAKERon the SNES and the fact that the PlayStation,
16:51SPEAKERthey couldn't make PlayStations fast enough, right?
16:53SPEAKERThey couldn't make the N64s fast enough.
16:55SPEAKERAnd they were unclear if the reporting at the time,
16:58SPEAKERas I recall, was that this is the harbinger of doom
17:03SPEAKERfor the games industry, not, oh, they can only make
17:07SPEAKERa limited number of these reality coprocessors.
17:11SPEAKERSo that's gating how many of these they can sell, right?
17:16SPEAKER'Cause there's a lot of stuff later on
17:18SPEAKERabout the rollout for this, 'cause it actually,
17:21SPEAKERlike the last, I think the last region they shipped this in
17:24SPEAKERin the initial rollout was France in the following September,
17:28SPEAKERSeptember of '97.
17:30SPEAKERSo it was Japan, then North America, then Europe,
17:32SPEAKERthen France for whatever reason.
17:34SPEAKERAnd it took a long time.
17:37SPEAKERIt was a, like, it was a imported,
17:40SPEAKERlike I knew a guy who imported an N64 from Japan early on
17:44SPEAKERand he was like, I mean, he was extremely cool in college
17:47SPEAKERwith a certain group of people.
17:49SPEAKER- Sure, I couldn't believe that.
17:51SPEAKER- He brought it to the computer lab where he played Quake
17:53SPEAKERand set it up on the projector in there.
17:55SPEAKERAnd we were like, we were playing Super Mario 64
17:58SPEAKER'cause that was the only game that he had.
18:00SPEAKER- That was kind of the only game.
18:01SPEAKERWell, some might quibble, but that was the game.
18:05SPEAKERAnyway, I'll do real quick, just to close the loop
18:08SPEAKERon the SGI expanding into consumer.
18:12SPEAKERApparently this was big news
18:13SPEAKERin the semiconductor trade press.
18:16SPEAKER- Oh yeah, 100%.
18:17SPEAKER- There is a quote on the Wikipedia page
18:19SPEAKERfrom Michael Slater of Microprocessor Report.
18:23SPEAKERThe mere fact of a business relationship there,
18:25SPEAKERhe's referring to the Nintendo SGI deal,
18:28SPEAKERis significant because of Nintendo's phenomenal ability
18:30SPEAKERto drive volume.
18:31SPEAKERIf it works at all, it could bring MIPS
18:33SPEAKERto levels of volume SGI never dreamed of.
18:36SPEAKER- I mean, and that's it,
18:38SPEAKER'cause SGI was selling probably hundreds of computers
18:41SPEAKERor maybe thousands of computers a month at that point.
18:44SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause again, they were insanely expensive
18:46SPEAKERand for a very specialized purpose.
18:47SPEAKER- Yeah, and this was, the N64 launch was before
18:51SPEAKERthey had gotten, like eventually they started
18:53SPEAKERmaking lower end workstations that were like
18:55SPEAKERin workstation price range, like five, six grand.
18:57SPEAKER- Yeah.
18:58SPEAKER- Or five to 20 grand, I guess.
19:00SPEAKERAt this point, I think that their machines
19:02SPEAKERwere still hundreds of thousands of dollars
19:04SPEAKERfor the most part.
19:05SPEAKER- Right, yeah, and this is still several years
19:06SPEAKERbefore the x86 commodity hardware market
19:09SPEAKERjust started eating all these big iron
19:11SPEAKERworkstation makers alive.
19:13SPEAKER- Yeah, a cheap desktop computer at this time period
19:16SPEAKERwould have still been 1500 bucks or two grand
19:18SPEAKERwithout a monitor, right?
19:20SPEAKER- Yeah.
19:21SPEAKER- So the N64 though kind of was a defining console
19:26SPEAKERfor a lot of reasons, and I'm gonna just talk about it first
19:30SPEAKER'cause it's unavoidable, but the controller
19:32SPEAKERwas that stupid three-prong shape with an analog stick,
19:35SPEAKERwhich was the first analog stick anybody shipped.
19:38SPEAKER- An analog stick and rumble, well, it was rumble.
19:40SPEAKER- Rumble came later.
19:41SPEAKER- Well, I know it was later, but the thing I was gonna say
19:43SPEAKERis I can never remember if it was Nintendo
19:46SPEAKERor 'cause Sony had the DualShock, the same generation,
19:49SPEAKERand I can't remember the actual dates.
19:50SPEAKERI forget.
19:51SPEAKER- I wanna say that rumble came shipped with Goldeneye
19:54SPEAKERor something, so that's the...
19:55SPEAKER- In my mind, Nintendo was first with rumble,
19:57SPEAKERbut it might've been PlayStation, but you're right.
19:59SPEAKERThe analog stick obviously was like insanely forward-looking
20:02SPEAKERconsidering how things went.
20:04SPEAKER- They were halfway there.
20:05SPEAKERThey got one, but they needed two, it turns out.
20:07SPEAKER- On the other hand, very backward-looking on the storage.
20:12SPEAKER- Yeah, the storage was, they were shipping ROM cartridges
20:14SPEAKERin a world of disk-based consoles.
20:16SPEAKERSo at launch, they were smaller, but they capped out
20:19SPEAKERI think 64 megabytes of max size.
20:22SPEAKERAnd the benefit of the ROMs, and this is something
20:25SPEAKERNintendo pushed a lot in advertising in the press,
20:27SPEAKERwas that they loaded almost instantly compared to a disk.
20:31SPEAKERSo instead of running at like 600 kilobytes per second,
20:35SPEAKERthey were running at five megabytes per second,
20:37SPEAKERwhich is a sort of significant speed increase
20:40SPEAKERand basically made your games loaded instantaneously.
20:43SPEAKER- Of course, this was the era of FMV though,
20:45SPEAKERand they were not doing that.
20:47SPEAKER- And real audio and real music.
20:48SPEAKERLike you couldn't play Quake on the N64
20:51SPEAKERwith the original nine-inch nail soundtrack
20:53SPEAKERbecause it would have taken,
20:55SPEAKERit took all the space on the cartridge.
20:59SPEAKERThis was, I think this was the first console
21:01SPEAKERwith four controller ports, is that right?
21:02SPEAKER- That sounds right to me.
21:05SPEAKERI can't think of another one.
21:05SPEAKER- 'Cause you needed the splitter on the N64
21:08SPEAKERand the NES and the Genesis and all.
21:11SPEAKER- You mean the SNES?
21:12SPEAKER- Yeah, the SNES, 'cause I said N64, yeah.
21:14SPEAKERBut on the SNES and the Genesis and all that,
21:17SPEAKERPlayStation only had two controllers, right?
21:19SPEAKER- Yeah, that's right.
21:20SPEAKERThe TurboGrafx PC Engine famously has one controller port.
21:23SPEAKER- That's insanity.
21:25SPEAKER- The Dreamcast had four.
21:26SPEAKER- That was much later.
21:27SPEAKER- GameCube had four, but I'm pretty sure
21:29SPEAKERthis is the first one with four.
21:31SPEAKER- Yeah, it turns out if you put more ports
21:33SPEAKERon the front of your console,
21:35SPEAKERpeople will buy more game heads.
21:37SPEAKER- Might sell more controllers,
21:38SPEAKERwhich are a pretty high margin business.
21:40SPEAKER- I think it shipped with one controller too, as I recall.
21:43SPEAKERI think you had to buy a second controller,
21:44SPEAKERwhich was a problem when Wave Race came out.
21:46SPEAKER- Yeah, in fact, whatever.
21:47SPEAKERIt's not really, we're mainly here
21:49SPEAKERfor the technical innards of the N64,
21:51SPEAKERbut yeah, this was the first generation
21:53SPEAKERfor Nintendo without a pack-in game.
21:55SPEAKER- Oh, right.
21:56SPEAKER- Also, for what it's worth.
21:58SPEAKER- God, I forgot about that.
21:58SPEAKERYou had to fight for copies of Mario 64.
22:01SPEAKER- Although they, well, whatever,
22:02SPEAKERthis is also more business stuff,
22:03SPEAKERbut they famously lowered the price of this thing
22:06SPEAKERbefore it came out.
22:07SPEAKERIt ended up debuting at 199 instead of the projected 250.
22:10SPEAKERSo you could kinda just put that money
22:12SPEAKERtoward Mario 64 anyway.
22:13SPEAKER- The announcement was weird,
22:15SPEAKER'cause they announced it with a different name.
22:16SPEAKERThey announced it as the Ultra 64.
22:18SPEAKER- Yes, it was the Ultra 64 for a long time,
22:20SPEAKERand I actually don't remember why that changed.
22:22SPEAKER- So I looked into that.
22:24SPEAKERI tried to find out a definitive reason
22:26SPEAKERwith the heat of retrospective on it, and I couldn't.
22:31SPEAKERThe rumors are that they had a Konami Ultra
22:37SPEAKERtrademark problem. - Oh, what?
22:39SPEAKEROh, man. - But there's
22:40SPEAKERno confirmation of that.
22:41SPEAKERNobody's ever confirmed it.
22:43SPEAKERSo it may be that they just were worried about that,
22:45SPEAKERand they were gun-shy, and they changed it the last minute.
22:49SPEAKERThe other thing I saw speculated
22:51SPEAKERwas that they wanted a worldwide brand.
22:52SPEAKERThey didn't wanna do Famicom Ultra in Japan
22:55SPEAKERand Nintendo 64, Ultra 64 in the West.
22:58SPEAKER- That seems way more plausible to me.
23:00SPEAKERThis was definitely getting into the era
23:01SPEAKERof kinda more global unified interest in video games,
23:05SPEAKERand the staggered launches and differentiated product names
23:08SPEAKERwere starting to feel kinda antiquated at this time.
23:10SPEAKERAlthough Ultra Games is one of my favorite game labels
23:15SPEAKERas some people may know.
23:17SPEAKERThat was just Konami's way of getting around Nintendo's limit
23:19SPEAKERon how many games you could put out a year
23:20SPEAKERby just making another imprint.
23:24SPEAKERBut also, Ultra Games is just such a rad logo
23:26SPEAKERand name for a game company.
23:28SPEAKER- It's a good logo.
23:33SPEAKERIt's also the first Nintendo console
23:34SPEAKERthat had the same design in the West in Japan.
23:38SPEAKER- Yes, yeah.
23:39SPEAKERYou mean industrial design? - Physical industrial design,
23:41SPEAKERyeah, 'cause-- - Form factor, yes.
23:42SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause Super Famicom and the N64
23:45SPEAKERlooked pretty significantly different.
23:49SPEAKERAnyway, so that's it.
23:50SPEAKERThey sold 33 million units over the life of the console.
23:53SPEAKERIt ran, they made it until like 2008, I think, 2009.
23:59SPEAKERIt was a wildly successful thing in a world--
24:01SPEAKER- Pretty well. - Yeah.
24:03SPEAKERNot as, but it was the first one that they sold
24:05SPEAKERthat wasn't the market leader, right?
24:06SPEAKER- Yes, let me, hang on, let me pull up the PlayStation 1
24:09SPEAKERbefore we get into the hardware here.
24:11SPEAKEROkay, just to put it in perspective,
24:12SPEAKERthe PlayStation 1 sold over 100 million units globally, so.
24:15SPEAKER- Yeah.
24:17SPEAKER- Like this did reasonably well, but like a mere fraction,
24:20SPEAKERbut I mean, like it can't be overstated
24:22SPEAKERthe extent to which Sony appeared in the game industry
24:24SPEAKERand then just completely dominated it.
24:26SPEAKER- Yeah, just out of nowhere.
24:28SPEAKEROkay, so hardware, what's actually in the box?
24:32SPEAKER- Yeah, that's what we're here to actually talk about.
24:34SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a weirdly future looking design
24:39SPEAKERwith a CPU graphics chip.
24:44SPEAKERIt had a unified memory architecture,
24:46SPEAKERwhich was, I guess, always the case on these,
24:49SPEAKERI mean, I guess there was no precedent at this era,
24:51SPEAKERso there was no previous generation with RAM,
24:55SPEAKERbut the unified memory architecture
24:57SPEAKERconnected through the graphics chip, weirdly.
25:00SPEAKERIt didn't have a dedicated audio chip.
25:02SPEAKERThat ran either on the reality coprocessor or the CPU,
25:06SPEAKERand that's kind of it, that's kind of where we are.
25:08SPEAKER- Yeah, okay, so there was a CPU
25:10SPEAKERand then there was the reality coprocessor,
25:12SPEAKERwhich definitely was the graphics chip,
25:14SPEAKERand like we'll get into, could be arguably called a GPU.
25:18SPEAKER- It's GPU-like, I would say, not necessarily a GPU.
25:22SPEAKER- But the reality coprocessor
25:23SPEAKERalso did a bunch of other stuff.
25:25SPEAKERSound could be processed on it as well.
25:27SPEAKERIt also handled, it basically was a memory controller.
25:30SPEAKERIt handled the sort of split in the unified memory.
25:34SPEAKER- Yeah. - That you were talking about.
25:35SPEAKERIt handled memory DMA, direct memory access.
25:37SPEAKERIt also handled IO for cartridges and controllers
25:41SPEAKERand that kind of thing.
25:42SPEAKERThe reality coprocessor also almost feels
25:45SPEAKERlike an early SOC minus a CPU to me,
25:48SPEAKERor at least sort of like the,
25:50SPEAKERyou know how motherboard chip sets
25:51SPEAKERstarted integrating more and more
25:53SPEAKERinto just the end of the chip,
25:55SPEAKERmemory controller, sound, IO, all that stuff?
25:58SPEAKERIt kind of feels like an early version of that.
26:00SPEAKER- It's almost like they took the stuff
26:02SPEAKERthat was typically in a PC Northbridge
26:04SPEAKERand jammed it in this thing.
26:06SPEAKER- That's exactly what I was thinking of
26:07SPEAKER'cause this wasn't quite the era.
26:09SPEAKERI guess it was maybe more close to 2000 and after,
26:11SPEAKERbut as you remember, there started to be fewer
26:15SPEAKERand fewer chips on PC motherboards as well
26:17SPEAKER'cause more of that kept getting integrated.
26:19SPEAKER- Yeah, well, the move to integrating
26:21SPEAKERthe memory controller happened in the 2000s
26:25SPEAKERand then a lot of stuff came downstream from that.
26:28SPEAKERBut yeah, so the CPU is a CPU.
26:31SPEAKERIt was a MIPS CPU.
26:33SPEAKERThe reality coprocessor is the star of the show, I think,
26:36SPEAKERand is the thing that was remarkable here.
26:39SPEAKER- Very much.
26:40SPEAKER- But we can, we should,
26:41SPEAKERand also there's a MIPS processor
26:43SPEAKERinside the reality coprocessor too, it's worth saying.
26:45SPEAKERSo it's like, yo dog, I heard you like CPUs.
26:50SPEAKERThe CPU, the main CPU was a MIPS processor
26:54SPEAKERdesigned by SGI.
26:56SPEAKER- Yeah, I guess we should say real quick,
26:57SPEAKERMIPS is the instruction set here.
26:59SPEAKER- Yeah, so like x86.
27:01SPEAKERMIPS is equivalent to x86 or power PC or 6502.
27:05SPEAKERIt's just a, it's kind of the language
27:06SPEAKERthat the CPU speaks here.
27:09SPEAKER- Well, and they provided a series of extensions.
27:11SPEAKERMIPS stands for microprocessor
27:13SPEAKERwithout interlocked pipeline stages.
27:15SPEAKER- Of course.
27:16SPEAKER- Basically they were saying,
27:17SPEAKERhey, you don't have to worry.
27:20SPEAKERIt was, this is the era before branch prediction, right?
27:22SPEAKERSo in a modern CPU, starting with the Pentium 4
27:26SPEAKERand some older Spark machines and stuff like that,
27:29SPEAKERbranch prediction would, when you reach a point
27:32SPEAKERin the register is where it says,
27:34SPEAKERhey, do some stuff or skip to this point.
27:38SPEAKERIt would just do, now it just does both of those.
27:40SPEAKERIt does all the computations
27:41SPEAKERand then throws out whatever it doesn't need.
27:43SPEAKERIn the old days, you had to keep the registers even.
27:46SPEAKERIt's like you were filling water in two,
27:50SPEAKERit's like you have two hoses, two ends of a hose.
27:53SPEAKERThe hose is filled with water and you get too high
27:54SPEAKERand water comes out one side or the other.
27:56SPEAKERIt's kind of the metaphor I've always heard for this.
27:58SPEAKERAnd if the water started blasting out,
28:00SPEAKERthen your CPU would go slow for whatever reason.
28:04SPEAKERBut the point is these processors were designed
28:09SPEAKERto not need as much kind of handholding
28:12SPEAKERand assembly level work
28:14SPEAKERto keep those branches filled and going.
28:18SPEAKERIn some cases, you even had to do dummy work
28:20SPEAKERto keep things working.
28:22SPEAKERAnd this was designed so that the compiler
28:25SPEAKERwould handle that stuff for the programmers
28:27SPEAKERand they didn't necessarily have to understand that.
28:29SPEAKERSo you could write code and see,
28:30SPEAKERit would run really well on these CPUs.
28:33SPEAKERNow, whether that actually worked or not,
28:35SPEAKERit remains to be seen.
28:36SPEAKERI think the advent of branch prediction
28:38SPEAKERand some of the stuff that Intel did in the early 2000s
28:40SPEAKERkind of ran MIPS out of existence
28:44SPEAKERfor high-end compute at least.
28:47SPEAKERBut yeah, this was a wild choice in 1995, '94,
28:54SPEAKERwhenever they started designing and announced this thing.
28:57SPEAKERReally, it's still the era
28:59SPEAKERof extremely bespoke console hardware designs,
29:02SPEAKERwhich would continue basically through the Xbox 360
29:04SPEAKERand the PS3 were kind of the last two
29:06SPEAKERreally esoteric consoles before everything just went x86
29:10SPEAKERand kind of relatively off-the-shelf GPUs.
29:13SPEAKER- Are you with the Switch, I think, too?
29:15SPEAKER- Yeah.
29:16SPEAKER- 'Cause it was just a souped up GameCube,
29:18SPEAKERwhich was still the last, anyway.
29:20SPEAKER- Oh, you mean the Wii?
29:21SPEAKER- Sorry, the Wii, not the Switch, yeah.
29:22SPEAKER- Yes, yes, the Wii was in that tradition as well,
29:25SPEAKERand the Wii U for that matter, but you know,
29:28SPEAKERthere were still bespoke risk chip designs being used
29:31SPEAKERup through the 360 and the PS3,
29:33SPEAKERbut this was very much still the thing here.
29:35SPEAKER- This is where the 64 comes from, though.
29:37SPEAKERThis is why it's called the N64s,
29:38SPEAKER'cause this is designed to let you do math
29:42SPEAKERon 64-bit chunks of data.
29:43SPEAKER- You could.
29:44SPEAKERI think we're not CPU guys here.
29:46SPEAKERI don't know how much we wanna get into the specifics
29:49SPEAKERof the width of the data bus and the instruction sizes
29:51SPEAKERand word size manipulation and stuff,
29:54SPEAKERbut I think the upshot here is this thing
29:56SPEAKERcould do 64-bit operations.
29:58SPEAKER- Asterisks, lots of asterisks.
30:00SPEAKER- But generally, 32-bit operations were faster,
30:03SPEAKERand basically games almost never used
30:06SPEAKERany kind of 64-bit functionality.
30:10SPEAKER- As I understand it, on the stripped down version
30:12SPEAKERof the MIPS 4300, the 4300i that they used for this,
30:18SPEAKERin order, the data buses were still 32-bits,
30:21SPEAKERso in order to get a 64-bit chunk of data,
30:23SPEAKERthen you had to do multiple 32-bit transfers,
30:28SPEAKERso it took multiple cycles, and so thus,
30:30SPEAKERyou were almost always better off running 32-bit mode,
30:33SPEAKERunless you were doing some real specific stuff.
30:35SPEAKER- It's funny, a couple months ago,
30:37SPEAKERa video showed up on my YouTube algorithm
30:39SPEAKERof somebody writing their own operating system for the N64.
30:42SPEAKER- Okay.
30:43SPEAKER- I looked at the YouTube comments,
30:44SPEAKERand it was maybe the single weirdest experience
30:46SPEAKERI've ever had with YouTube comments,
30:47SPEAKERbecause they were 100% universally by people
30:50SPEAKERwho knew exactly what was going on in this video,
30:53SPEAKERlike that seemed like they were all people
30:55SPEAKERwho also programmed the N64,
30:57SPEAKERbecause the comments were nothing but people talking
30:59SPEAKERabout the design of this person's operating system,
31:02SPEAKERand so I even got a sense of the word
31:05SPEAKERand double word instructions for the chip in this thing
31:09SPEAKERfrom those comments, so people talking about like,
31:10SPEAKERdouble word is a 64-bit word in N64 nomenclature,
31:16SPEAKERbut even there, I got a strong sense
31:17SPEAKERthat everybody was saying, oh yeah,
31:19SPEAKERyou would just do all this in 32-bit, right?
31:21SPEAKERLike this isn't gonna be a 32-bit operating system,
31:23SPEAKERobviously, because that is the actual way
31:25SPEAKERto get speed out of the N64.
31:28SPEAKER- Well, and it's worth mentioning,
31:29SPEAKERthe instructions were always 32-bit.
31:32SPEAKERLike, so you were running 32-bit instructions
31:34SPEAKERon 64 bits of data, not 64-bit instructions
31:37SPEAKERon 64 bits of data, like you would do with X64
31:39SPEAKERor AMD64 or whatever.
31:40SPEAKER- It really highlights how much the bit label
31:44SPEAKERat this time was a marketing thing, primarily,
31:46SPEAKERbecause the actual definition of what makes a 32-
31:49SPEAKERor 64-bit console is extremely open to interpretation,
31:52SPEAKERit doesn't always actually matter,
31:53SPEAKERbut people at the time, the public just used it
31:56SPEAKERas a linear measure of power.
31:57SPEAKERIt's like, oh, 64 obviously is twice 32, right?
32:01SPEAKER- Well, and 16 and 32 were just the color depths
32:03SPEAKERof the output buffers, right?
32:06SPEAKER- You mean on the 16-bit consoles?
32:08SPEAKER- Yeah, 16-bit consoles.
32:09SPEAKER- I don't know, I'm not a good person to ask.
32:12SPEAKER- Okay, this is a future episode, a topic, I guess.
32:16SPEAKERApparently, this chip was used in a buttload
32:18SPEAKERof NEC printers down the road,
32:20SPEAKERso your NEC printer might have the same CPU as your N64.
32:23SPEAKERI think that's funny, just silicon.
32:26SPEAKER- MIPS is still around.
32:27SPEAKER- Oh yeah, they sell, there's a ton of MIPS devices,
32:31SPEAKERactually, like routers and stuff like that, right?
32:33SPEAKER- Well, I don't know how many these days,
32:34SPEAKERbut my EdgeRouter 4 has a MIPS chip in it,
32:36SPEAKERso that is still used here and there.
32:39SPEAKER- Kind of, as I recall, in the pre-gigabit days,
32:44SPEAKERthere were a lot of consumer-level MIPS routers,
32:47SPEAKERso like ASUS routers and all that.
32:50SPEAKERYeah, before, well, they weren't fast enough
32:52SPEAKERto feed gigabit was the problem, I think.
32:55SPEAKERSo anyway, Tom Halfhill, who wrote a CPU column
32:59SPEAKERat Maximum PC for years and was a columnist at Byte
33:01SPEAKERfor years before that, wrote an article about the R4000,
33:08SPEAKERand this was in June of 1993 as a sidebar
33:12SPEAKERon their cover story about MIPS,
33:14SPEAKERand his take was basically that it was,
33:17SPEAKERthis cost the same as a 33 megahertz Intel 486,
33:21SPEAKERbut was a lot faster, 'cause it was risk-based,
33:24SPEAKERso the instructions were serial
33:26SPEAKERand they could get higher clocks
33:28SPEAKERand all the same things that we heard about
33:30SPEAKERRISC PC designs for years and years and years.
33:34SPEAKERSo yeah, it was a weird time when it wasn't yet clear
33:40SPEAKERthat x86 was gonna be the dominating force in compute,
33:44SPEAKERgoing forward, like NT4 shipped with a MIPS version.
33:49SPEAKERWhen you had a Windows NT4 CD, you could put it on
33:53SPEAKERand you could install it on this,
33:54SPEAKERon a MIPS machine, a DC alpha, you could put it on a,
33:57SPEAKERI think there was a Spark version even, I can't remember,
34:00SPEAKERbut this was definitely part of the potential
34:05SPEAKERmainstream CPU melange of the time.
34:08SPEAKER- Yeah, for sure.
34:10SPEAKEROkay, here is my basic understanding of how the N64 works.
34:14SPEAKERThe CPU is just there to do all of the setup.
34:17SPEAKER- That's right.
34:18SPEAKER- And then it hands all the setup off
34:19SPEAKERto the reality coprocessor
34:20SPEAKERand that's where all the heavy lifting happens.
34:22SPEAKERBasically the CPU, CPU runs game logic
34:25SPEAKERand does the like basic 3D setup.
34:29SPEAKERI don't know if that's lists of vertices
34:31SPEAKERor what like very, I don't know what like 3D primitives
34:34SPEAKERthe CPU is handling, but this is where the GPU part comes in
34:38SPEAKERwhere Nvidia's definition of what a GPU is starts to matter
34:41SPEAKERor what their definition would be because the GeForce 256
34:44SPEAKERcame out three years after this console.
34:46SPEAKERBut the reality coprocessor is taking all that basic setup
34:50SPEAKERfrom the CPU and that's where it's crunching,
34:53SPEAKERdoing all the hardware geometry transformations.
34:56SPEAKERThat's where it's rasterizing to 2D.
34:59SPEAKER- That's right.
35:00SPEAKER- Doing occlusion, which was done in a new way or used-
35:03SPEAKER- It had a Z-buffer, man.
35:04SPEAKER- Right, it used a Z-buffer here for occlusion,
35:08SPEAKERmeaning that it, but that's where you basically
35:10SPEAKERhave to figure out what is in front of what else
35:12SPEAKERin a 3D scene because you can't afford to waste
35:14SPEAKERprocessing time on polygons or pixels
35:17SPEAKERthat are behind other polygons or pixels
35:19SPEAKERand you'll never see.
35:20SPEAKERAnd so you need to throw those things out.
35:21SPEAKERAnd on the previous, right, so on the previous 3D consoles,
35:27SPEAKERI think by and large developers had to do that
35:28SPEAKERin software themselves, but the N64 had a hardware Z-buffer
35:32SPEAKERthat would handle that for you.
35:34SPEAKER- Yeah, so, okay, so I think you're correct
35:37SPEAKERon most of that, the Vertex setup and all that stuff
35:41SPEAKERhappened in the reality coprocessor, though.
35:43SPEAKERIt wasn't handled by the CPU.
35:45SPEAKERSo the CPU basically just handled game logic
35:46SPEAKERand often audio, it turns out.
35:48SPEAKERSo this was a choice that developers had to make
35:51SPEAKERfor the console in general 'cause there was
35:52SPEAKERno dedicated audio processor.
35:54SPEAKERSo you could run your audio on whichever of the processors
35:58SPEAKERyou had kind of spare cycles for was the,
36:02SPEAKERseemed to be the general consensus,
36:03SPEAKERat least in the homebrew community stuff that I was reading.
36:07SPEAKERBut the reality coprocessor was the thing that Nintendo,
36:11SPEAKERit's funny, Nintendo is kind of like Apple in this case.
36:13SPEAKERThey don't market, even back then they didn't really
36:16SPEAKERmarket chips and speeds and feeds and stuff like that.
36:19SPEAKERIt was just like, yo, this is the box you'd get
36:20SPEAKERif you wanna play Mario.
36:22SPEAKERBut they did talk about the reality coprocessor
36:24SPEAKERand they branded it and gave it a name in the whole thing.
36:29SPEAKERAlso because it handled memory and had the DMA,
36:32SPEAKERthe direct memory access functions
36:35SPEAKERis why it was the centerpiece.
36:36SPEAKERIt's why it handled the whole thing.
36:38SPEAKERAnd it, you're right, it took the stuff from the game,
36:40SPEAKERfrom the, that was running the game on the CPU
36:43SPEAKERand then turned it into pictures
36:46SPEAKERand output those pictures to the frame buffer
36:49SPEAKERand then out to the video DAC.
36:52SPEAKERSo, 'cause of course these were all analog consoles.
36:55SPEAKERThere's no digital outputs on any of,
36:56SPEAKERat this point anywhere.
36:59SPEAKERThe reality coprocessor, the thing that makes it like a GPU
37:05SPEAKERis that it did the geometry calculations in hardware,
37:08SPEAKERwhich was pretty unusual for consumer hardware
37:12SPEAKERat this point.
37:13SPEAKERLike video cards for PCs wouldn't do this for years.
37:15SPEAKER- Right, like just to reiterate the point
37:17SPEAKERthat that was the defining feature of the GeForce 256
37:20SPEAKERthat Nvidia was everywhere.
37:22SPEAKER- Transforming lighting, yeah.
37:23SPEAKER- Yes, was everywhere in the marketing for that thing
37:25SPEAKERsaying finally we have moved the geometry setup
37:27SPEAKERonto the GPU and the lighting setup.
37:30SPEAKEROr in fact, that's where they coined the term GPU
37:32SPEAKERand that was their rationale was,
37:34SPEAKERnow it's a graphics processing unit
37:35SPEAKERbecause the CPU doesn't have to do this work anymore.
37:37SPEAKERThe 3D card handles it.
37:39SPEAKERAnd so here was the N64 doing a version of that
37:42SPEAKERlike three years earlier. - Four years,
37:43SPEAKERthree and a half years before, yeah.
37:46SPEAKER- And interestingly, this is kind of a minor detail,
37:48SPEAKERbut the geometry setup was not fixed function on the chip
37:53SPEAKERon this thing. - No.
37:54SPEAKER- It was actually, it was handled by microcode.
37:56SPEAKERLike it was effectively like a version
37:59SPEAKERof a programmable geometry pipeline.
38:01SPEAKER- I wanna say they could do,
38:02SPEAKERyou could, there were limited number of instructions
38:05SPEAKERyou could run at a time based on performance,
38:07SPEAKERbut that's how they did things like the shiny metal pools
38:11SPEAKERand Super Mario 64 and stuff like that.
38:13SPEAKERThat was, those were all Vertex calculations.
38:16SPEAKER- And also an even more minor detail
38:19SPEAKERis that initially developers could not modify
38:21SPEAKERthat microcode themselves.
38:22SPEAKERNintendo provided libraries that had different types
38:25SPEAKERof geometry calculations, but as a developer,
38:28SPEAKERyou just had to pick from one because the instruction set
38:31SPEAKERwas not documented for that microcode.
38:33SPEAKERBut then later on, later on SGI and Nintendo
38:36SPEAKERopened up some documentation
38:37SPEAKERso you could start writing your own.
38:38SPEAKER- That part was wild.
38:39SPEAKERI had no idea that they didn't,
38:41SPEAKERlike the idea that you could spend a quarter of a million
38:44SPEAKERdollars on an Nintendo 64 dev kit and not get access
38:47SPEAKERto the full instruction set that was available to you
38:50SPEAKERis insane. - Yeah.
38:52SPEAKERYou know, I bet that some version of that
38:55SPEAKERis basically the story of every console though,
38:57SPEAKERor at least up until the modern era
38:59SPEAKERof very common development tools for common hardware
39:03SPEAKERthat we're in now.
39:04SPEAKERBut back then when everything was bespoke,
39:07SPEAKERI think that that was kind of just how things went.
39:08SPEAKERLike documentation was poor,
39:10SPEAKERfunctionality was not always exposed early on,
39:12SPEAKERbut over the course of the system.
39:14SPEAKER'Cause you know, games always would get much better
39:16SPEAKERover the course of a system as developers got better
39:18SPEAKERwith working with the hardware.
39:19SPEAKERAnd I'm sure a lot of that came down to like
39:21SPEAKERpoor documentation and lack of access early on.
39:24SPEAKER- God, we could have played Turok with all the fog
39:27SPEAKERif they'd just had better, better.
39:29SPEAKER- Should we, okay, so there's three modules,
39:33SPEAKERreality coprocessor, a whopping 62.5 megahertz,
39:36SPEAKERwhich was paired with the 93.75 megahertz CPU.
39:42SPEAKERIt had three components.
39:44SPEAKERThere's three main modules inside it.
39:46SPEAKERAnd it's a pretty big processor by the era,
39:49SPEAKERthe standard of the time.
39:51SPEAKER- Like you mean just physically big?
39:53SPEAKER- When you look at the boards, like the MIPS CPU in this
39:57SPEAKERare basically the same size, which was unusual.
39:59SPEAKER- Yeah.
40:01SPEAKER- So there's three main components.
40:02SPEAKERThere's the reality signal processor,
40:04SPEAKERwhich is basically another CPU on this chip.
40:08SPEAKERIt's a cut down MIPS R4000, another cut down MIPS R4000.
40:13SPEAKERAnd it stores like commands and data in RAM.
40:18SPEAKERAnd the CPU rather stores the commands and data in RAM.
40:20SPEAKERAnd then the RSP runs those commands on the data.
40:24SPEAKERSo the CPU is handing a list of things to do
40:26SPEAKERoff to this thing.
40:27SPEAKERAnd it just does them presumably very fast.
40:30SPEAKER- Right.
40:31SPEAKER- And this is because this is the memory.
40:34SPEAKERThis has the direct access to memory.
40:36SPEAKERSo everything's coming through the IO module,
40:39SPEAKERwhich is one of the other sections of this processor.
40:43SPEAKER- Yeah, this is kind of where I was saying
40:44SPEAKERthis feels like an early proto SOC
40:47SPEAKERwhere this thing does a bunch of different things
40:48SPEAKERwith different modules on it.
40:50SPEAKER- Yeah, it's partly that.
40:54SPEAKERAnd then it's partly, I mean, cause it's all one die, right?
40:57SPEAKERThere's SOCs, usually multiple dies.
41:01SPEAKERBut it also is doing all the traffic cop stuff of the,
41:05SPEAKERit's like a souped up Northbridge
41:06SPEAKERis the metaphor I went for immediately.
41:09SPEAKERThe IO module communicates with the CPU,
41:12SPEAKERalso stuff external like the controllers and chargers,
41:16SPEAKERcartridges and all the decks for the video and audio output,
41:20SPEAKERthat kind of stuff.
41:21SPEAKERSo everything, that's your traffic cop component.
41:24SPEAKERAnd then the last part is the reality display processor,
41:27SPEAKERwhich takes the output from the reality signal processor
41:31SPEAKERand draws the frame into a frame buffer,
41:33SPEAKERwhich then gets passed out to the deck.
41:36SPEAKER- And analyzes rasterization,
41:37SPEAKERwhich like I've known that term for years.
41:39SPEAKERI'm not sure I ever fully connected exactly
41:41SPEAKERwhat was going on there until I read this article,
41:43SPEAKERwhich is, I mean, I've known you have to do transforms
41:45SPEAKERon 3D scene data to make it display right
41:47SPEAKERon a 2D display, right?
41:49SPEAKERYou get all kinds of weird warping and stuff
41:51SPEAKERif you try to just project your 3D scene
41:53SPEAKERstraight to a 2D plane without doing the correct,
41:56SPEAKERyou know, the corrections for it.
41:57SPEAKERBut that's what rasterization is, right?
41:59SPEAKERIt's doing the-
42:00SPEAKER- It's turning the scene into pixels, yeah.
42:02SPEAKER- Doing the work of taking 3D scene data
42:04SPEAKERand making it a 2D image that looks correct.
42:07SPEAKER- Yeah, and the reality display processor
42:09SPEAKERdoes all the other stuff that you have to do
42:10SPEAKERto make that look right.
42:11SPEAKERLike the texture filtering and the mipmapping
42:14SPEAKERand the bilinear filtering,
42:15SPEAKERand they even had some rudimentary perspective correction
42:18SPEAKERon this.
42:19SPEAKERA lot of, part of, this is one of the places
42:23SPEAKERthat they had some kind of shortcomings
42:24SPEAKERon the hardware that they didn't realize
42:26SPEAKERwere gonna be shortcomings until much later.
42:28SPEAKERBut the amount of RAM accessible
42:32SPEAKERto this part of the pipeline was really low,
42:35SPEAKERwhich is why textures,
42:37SPEAKERmost games on the N64 used flat shaded Garon surfaces
42:41SPEAKERinstead of Garo, is that how you say it?
42:43SPEAKER- Yeah, it's called Garo shading.
42:44SPEAKER- I've never heard that pronounced before, I don't think.
42:46SPEAKER- Maybe not every game later on,
42:47SPEAKERthey started using a lot more textures,
42:49SPEAKERbut especially early on,
42:50SPEAKERlike the Capetti breakdown points out,
42:52SPEAKERlike, you know, see all of the solid color
42:55SPEAKERGaro shaded character models in Mario 64, for example,
42:58SPEAKERas a way of presumably saving,
43:01SPEAKER'cause they could not fit many textures in.
43:03SPEAKER- Yeah, it was, you had to make a choice.
43:05SPEAKERA lot of the texture is--
43:06SPEAKER- The texture, sorry, just to really provide the detail here,
43:09SPEAKERthe texture unit has four kilobytes of memory.
43:11SPEAKER- Yeah, it's not enough, it turns out.
43:14SPEAKERA lot of that, in my understanding,
43:16SPEAKERis also why they used, like,
43:17SPEAKERsome programmatically generated stuff on the device,
43:20SPEAKERon homebrew games later on, at least.
43:24SPEAKERBut yeah, so the display processor
43:26SPEAKERis where the Z-buffer stuff happened.
43:28SPEAKERThis was, the Z-buffer used,
43:31SPEAKERlike, it's really weird 'cause they had nine bits of data
43:34SPEAKERon each memory chunk,
43:36SPEAKERand that ninth one is basically how deep it is in the scene,
43:40SPEAKERso then the renderer would only render
43:42SPEAKERthe closest to the front of the scene,
43:44SPEAKERthe highest number on the Z-buffer,
43:45SPEAKERlowest number on the Z-buffer, I can't remember which.
43:47SPEAKER- Yeah, reading the article makes it pretty easy
43:49SPEAKERto understand, like it would just do,
43:50SPEAKERevery time it was rasterizing a new pixel,
43:53SPEAKERit would do a depth check against that,
43:55SPEAKERand if the depth was such that this pixel
43:58SPEAKERwas behind other stuff that was already on screen,
44:00SPEAKERit was just thrown out.
44:01SPEAKER- It just stopped.
44:02SPEAKERIt also added some color combiners and blenders,
44:06SPEAKERso the color combiner lets you mix multiple colors,
44:08SPEAKERyou could have some semi-transparent pixels.
44:11SPEAKERThe blender would let you blend a current frame
44:13SPEAKERwith past frame, or the currently rendered frame
44:16SPEAKERwith the frame that's in the frame buffer,
44:18SPEAKERwhich is really interesting 'cause you ended up
44:19SPEAKERwith almost like temporal-type effects,
44:21SPEAKERand that's how you did a lot of transparency
44:23SPEAKERand translucency and some of the fog and stuff like that.
44:30SPEAKERYeah, it was extremely limited texture memory.
44:33SPEAKERThat was the big surprise for me.
44:35SPEAKERI don't know what you do with four kilobytes of texture RAM.
44:38SPEAKERThat's wild.
44:40SPEAKERThe RSP does the vector math,
44:44SPEAKERso this is like the hardware transform
44:47SPEAKERand lighting setup section.
44:49SPEAKERIt's a lightly programmable geometry pipeline.
44:55SPEAKERThis is where the DMA access works,
44:57SPEAKERso this is the direct memory access pipeline
44:59SPEAKERfor this processor.
45:06SPEAKEROn one hand, probably nobody knew how to write
45:09SPEAKERa vertex shader equivalent code at this period of time,
45:13SPEAKERbut it's wild to me
45:15SPEAKERthat they didn't provide docs for that still.
45:17SPEAKERAnd then the last part of it is the video interface,
45:19SPEAKERwhich takes the frame buffer
45:20SPEAKERand displays it all out on the TV.
45:22SPEAKERI didn't realize this, but it was 32 bits of color depth,
45:25SPEAKERand most of the launch games,
45:27SPEAKERup until the time the memory expansion pack shipped,
45:31SPEAKERwhich we'll talk about in a minute, ran at 320 by 240.
45:36SPEAKERSome of the later games ran at 640 by 480.
45:39SPEAKERDid you notice a difference in the 640 by 480
45:43SPEAKERand 320 by 240 games at the time?
45:45SPEAKER- I don't remember playing any games at 640 by 480,
45:49SPEAKERso I can't say that I ever even saw one.
45:53SPEAKERI do remember some PlayStation games, though.
45:56SPEAKERJust generally, if you're asking perceptually
45:58SPEAKERwhat I remember, 1,000% yes.
46:00SPEAKERI remember "Toball" number one, for example,
46:02SPEAKERis a fighting game on the N64
46:04SPEAKERthat ran at 640, 480, and 60 FPS,
46:07SPEAKERand that was profoundly impactful.
46:10SPEAKERI was like, man, this is the sharpest looking thing
46:12SPEAKERI've ever seen, although maybe, again, to the point,
46:15SPEAKERthat's another game that uses a lot of untextured
46:18SPEAKERand very simple shaded polygons, for example,
46:20SPEAKERand that game outputted, inter-placed,
46:23SPEAKERso they had a lot of flicker to it,
46:25SPEAKERa lot of compromises at that time.
46:27SPEAKER- Yeah, it turns out TVs weren't really meant
46:29SPEAKERfor this analog TVs, at least.
46:31SPEAKER- Oh, actually, I have a list here.
46:34SPEAKER- Oh, 640 by 480 games?
46:35SPEAKER- Or a few, let's see, Indiana Jones,
46:41SPEAKERVigilante 8, very few.
46:43SPEAKERIt looks like very few N64 games shipped
46:46SPEAKERthat could run at 6, 4. (laughs)
46:49SPEAKERWhen "Perfect Dark" is rendering the N64 logo
46:52SPEAKERthat turns into the "Perfect Dark" logo,
46:53SPEAKERit is briefly running at 576 by 480,
46:55SPEAKERso there were not a lot of games
46:58SPEAKERusing the high resolution modes, apparently.
47:00SPEAKER- Okay, good to know.
47:02SPEAKER- But again, and I think we're about
47:03SPEAKERto get into the memory stuff,
47:05SPEAKERI believe the RAM expansion pack did help with that.
47:08SPEAKER- Yeah, I was gonna say, the last thing I wanted to say
47:10SPEAKERis this was a pretty competent piece of hardware
47:15SPEAKERin terms of raw rendering power
47:17SPEAKERfor the 200 bucks that you paid for it.
47:19SPEAKERWhen you compare this to "Quake,"
47:21SPEAKERwhich was in terms of what your hero character
47:25SPEAKERthat you'd see on the screen a lot was rendered at,
47:28SPEAKERLink from "Ocarina" had 704 triangles,
47:32SPEAKERwhich was a lot at the time.
47:33SPEAKERThe "Quake" guy was only 450.
47:35SPEAKERNow, "Quake" was designed for software renders,
47:37SPEAKERso it was a little bit different situation,
47:39SPEAKERbut this was, it's funny to say this,
47:45SPEAKERbut being able to render a character with 700 triangles
47:48SPEAKERon it all the time was impressive in 1996, 1997.
47:51SPEAKER- Sure.
47:53SPEAKER- Yeah, the "Capetti" article has got actually
47:55SPEAKERa couple cool little wireframe model viewers,
47:57SPEAKERor not just wireframe, they've got wireframe surface
48:01SPEAKERand textured models of Link and Kirby and stuff,
48:05SPEAKERso you can kind of drag them around
48:06SPEAKERand look at what we're talking about.
48:09SPEAKER- There's lots of good pictures,
48:09SPEAKERlike there's teardowns of the chips,
48:11SPEAKERthere's all sorts of stuff in there,
48:13SPEAKERif you will put a link in the show notes
48:14SPEAKERso you can check it out if you want to take a look at it,
48:16SPEAKERbut it's an unbelievable resource.
48:19SPEAKERThe unified memory architecture was interesting.
48:20SPEAKERThis thing shipped with RAM bus DRAM,
48:22SPEAKERwhich was basically serialized RAM,
48:24SPEAKERso SDRAM, DDR RAM runs in parallel.
48:29SPEAKEREach chip is wired in parallel.
48:30SPEAKERThese were all run in serial,
48:31SPEAKERso the clocks were much higher.
48:33SPEAKERIt ran hotter generally.
48:35SPEAKERIt was faster for certain types of operations
48:37SPEAKERand slower for others, as the normal,
48:40SPEAKERhey, you get three things, pick,
48:43SPEAKERhere are three things, pick two,
48:44SPEAKERand they chose fast and good and not cheap.
48:47SPEAKER- Yeah, so looking back,
48:49SPEAKERthere was right behind all the hype around Ultra 64
48:51SPEAKERand Project Reality and SGI and all that stuff,
48:54SPEAKERlike RAM bus also had a fair amount of hype
48:56SPEAKERattached to it in the press,
48:58SPEAKERbut I guess the way you're describing it,
49:00SPEAKERRDRAM was just another competing standard with SDRAM, right?
49:04SPEAKER- Well, it wasn't really a standard.
49:05SPEAKERIt was a proprietary thing. - Or proprietary.
49:07SPEAKERI'm sure they wanted it to be a standard
49:09SPEAKERthat they owned the patent to
49:10SPEAKERand could charge a lot of money for.
49:13SPEAKER- The big thing was because it was a serial bus,
49:15SPEAKERit required termination.
49:16SPEAKER- Yeah, that was really funny reading about this.
49:18SPEAKERI didn't realize, I guess,
49:19SPEAKERso you had to terminate RDRAM in PCs that used it?
49:22SPEAKER- Yeah, when Pentium 4 started shipping
49:24SPEAKERwith RAM bus support, you had to plug a,
49:28SPEAKERI can't remember what it's called, it was a RIM.
49:30SPEAKERBasically, the RAM was in RIMs,
49:32SPEAKERand then you had to plug a terminator into any unused slots,
49:35SPEAKERand that was because there was signal bounced
49:37SPEAKERback and forth down the chain, basically.
49:39SPEAKER- The Capetti article actually mentions
49:41SPEAKERthose were called continuity RIMs in PCs or C-RIMs.
49:44SPEAKER- Yeah, CRIMs is what Gordon always called them.
49:47SPEAKER- I feel like, yeah, CRIM, yeah.
49:48SPEAKERI feel like termination is not even a concept
49:51SPEAKERthat's really known in modern PCs
49:52SPEAKER'cause it's not really necessary,
49:54SPEAKERbut SCSI drive chains also had to do this back in the day.
49:57SPEAKERThere were all kinds of technologies
49:58SPEAKERwhere you had to physically put an end point
50:01SPEAKERon a chain of devices like this
50:04SPEAKERbecause it needed that to know where the chain ended
50:07SPEAKERso it could handle the signaling properly.
50:10SPEAKER- It turns out, for stuff that normal humans use,
50:12SPEAKERthey just self-terminate everything.
50:14SPEAKERIt makes it much easier.
50:15SPEAKER- Right, they figured that out.
50:16SPEAKERBut the funny way that this ties into the N64 is that,
50:19SPEAKERso the N64 had the RAM expansion slot,
50:22SPEAKERbut it was already populated with a little dongle
50:24SPEAKERthat seemingly, to the end user,
50:26SPEAKERdidn't do anything at the time of launch,
50:29SPEAKERbut that dummy kind of fake RAM expansion pack in there
50:33SPEAKERwas the terminator.
50:34SPEAKER- Yeah.
50:35SPEAKER- So you couldn't boot your N64 without,
50:36SPEAKERI think they called it the jumper pack,
50:39SPEAKERand all that is is there to terminate the RD-RAM bus.
50:42SPEAKER- Just some capacitors and resistors, yeah.
50:44SPEAKER- So the N64 won't boot with that thing removed
50:46SPEAKEReven though it seems like it doesn't do anything.
50:48SPEAKER- Did you ever pull yours out?
50:50SPEAKER- I don't think so.
50:51SPEAKER- I was afraid to until I got the expansion pack.
50:54SPEAKERIt felt like doing surgery,
50:55SPEAKERand I built multiple PCs by that point.
50:57SPEAKERIt was weird.
50:58SPEAKERSo the expansion pack was a,
51:00SPEAKERthe machine shipped with four,
51:02SPEAKERI've almost said four gigabytes, but four megabytes of RAM,
51:06SPEAKERyou could get a later on,
51:08SPEAKERI don't remember the first game that shipped with it was-
51:10SPEAKER- Was it Majora?
51:11SPEAKER- Was it Majora?
51:12SPEAKER- I think Majora's Mask is the one I bought mine with,
51:14SPEAKERor was it maybe Donkey Kong?
51:16SPEAKERI forget which game needed it for-
51:18SPEAKER- DK64.
51:19SPEAKER- Yeah, I forget which game was the first one
51:20SPEAKERthat could use it, but.
51:23SPEAKER- Sometimes they bundled it, right?
51:26SPEAKER- Maybe, I don't know if they ever bundled it with games.
51:28SPEAKERI know we'll get to it,
51:28SPEAKERbut I think they bundled it with the 64DD in Japan.
51:31SPEAKER- Ah, that makes sense.
51:32SPEAKER- But I don't know if they ever sold
51:34SPEAKERan actual retail SKU with it in a game.
51:37SPEAKER- So the upshot is it was basically just RAM.
51:41SPEAKERIt was just PC RAM.
51:42SPEAKER- Just more RAM.
51:43SPEAKER- Yeah.
51:44SPEAKERAnd they, different games use it for different stuff.
51:48SPEAKERAnd some games, it was optional for a lot of games,
51:50SPEAKERlike games would use it if it was there,
51:52SPEAKERbut for the most part, it was,
51:54SPEAKERall of a sudden you got a little bit of a speed boost
51:56SPEAKERon games that supported it.
51:58SPEAKERGames that didn't support it didn't do anything,
52:00SPEAKERas I recall.
52:02SPEAKERWe talked about not having an audio chip.
52:04SPEAKERMost stuff seems to have run on either the CPU or the RCP,
52:09SPEAKERjust 'cause there was extra processors
52:11SPEAKERin the signal processor, typically.
52:14SPEAKERExtra processor cycles.
52:15SPEAKERAnd then there were the accessories.
52:17SPEAKERSo the controllers.
52:19SPEAKERWe talked about the weird three-prong shape.
52:22SPEAKERThis is the last, is this the last controller
52:24SPEAKERthat didn't use the standard format?
52:26SPEAKERThe two sticks and four face buttons and two bumpers?
52:29SPEAKER- Oh, the GameCube controller, famously weird.
52:32SPEAKERRemember the lima bean buttons?
52:35SPEAKERIt's got one giant A button, a small B button,
52:37SPEAKERand then the weird lima bean buttons.
52:38SPEAKER- Yeah, no, you're not wrong.
52:39SPEAKERI like the GameCube controller.
52:41SPEAKERI might be the only person on Earth who does,
52:43SPEAKERbut I think it's good.
52:44SPEAKER- And the weird little C-stick, it's okay.
52:46SPEAKER- Yeah.
52:48SPEAKERIt was the first controller that launched
52:49SPEAKERwith an analog stick, which was like,
52:53SPEAKERplaying Mario 64 was part running, for the first time,
52:57SPEAKERwas part running around looking at,
52:58SPEAKER"Oh my God, everything's in 3D.
52:59SPEAKER"I can jump, I can, there's shadows.
53:02SPEAKER"What is this going on?"
53:03SPEAKER- Yeah, I think it's out of scope for this episode
53:05SPEAKER'cause we're not a game design podcast,
53:07SPEAKERbut as much as the hardware was pretty impressive
53:09SPEAKERin this thing, it's really the software design
53:11SPEAKERand what Nintendo figured out with 3D camera.
53:13SPEAKERI mean, even then, the camera in Mario 64
53:16SPEAKERis extremely primitive by modern standards,
53:18SPEAKERbut still, there had been other 3D platformers.
53:22SPEAKERObviously, there were other 3D games on the market,
53:24SPEAKERbut the extent to which Nintendo pushed
53:27SPEAKERnavigating a 3D world forward with the design of Mario 64
53:31SPEAKERjust cannot be overstated.
53:32SPEAKER- And a lot of it's stuff
53:34SPEAKERthat seems like table stakes these days, right?
53:36SPEAKERSo things like, "Hey, your guy has a shadow on the ground
53:40SPEAKER"underneath you so you can see where he's gonna land,"
53:43SPEAKERmade that game work.
53:44SPEAKERLike, there's a million little touches in there
53:46SPEAKERthat just, you couldn't have done,
53:48SPEAKERand I don't think you could have done it
53:49SPEAKERwithout the analog stick.
53:51SPEAKER- Yeah, and they used it.
53:52SPEAKERLike they said, that was, in fact,
53:54SPEAKERprobably the first real example of Nintendo
53:56SPEAKERactually using all their weird little gimmicks.
53:58SPEAKERThere's like parts where,
54:00SPEAKERthere's parts where you have to tiptoe
54:01SPEAKERaround sleeping piranha flowers
54:02SPEAKERby just barely pushing the stick so you don't wake them up.
54:05SPEAKERYou know, like they always went out of their way
54:07SPEAKERto show how the technology could be used.
54:10SPEAKERI think this is the first controller with an expansion slot,
54:13SPEAKERas far as I can remember.
54:15SPEAKER- There were expansion slots on the PS1,
54:17SPEAKERbut they were on the console side, right?
54:19SPEAKER- No, no. - Is that where
54:20SPEAKERyou put the memory card?
54:21SPEAKER- Yeah, PS1 just has controller ports and memory card slots,
54:24SPEAKERbut those were basically just for memory card.
54:26SPEAKERBut here, you could get memory card,
54:28SPEAKERyou could get rumble pack later.
54:30SPEAKER- I remember buying a third controller eventually
54:33SPEAKERwhen my wife and I were playing a lot of Mario Kart 64
54:36SPEAKERbecause I needed a place to put the saves.
54:41SPEAKERAnd we both wanted rumble on the game,
54:43SPEAKERwhatever game we were playing.
54:44SPEAKERMaybe it was Diddy Kong, I can't remember.
54:46SPEAKERBut yeah, yeah, it was a weird time
54:50SPEAKER'cause you could only put one thing in.
54:51SPEAKERSo you had to choose between rumble, memory card.
54:55SPEAKER- Which is it gonna be?
54:56SPEAKER- Yeah, transfer pack was the other thing you could do.
54:58SPEAKER- I don't think I've ever heard of the transfer pack
55:01SPEAKERor I had suppressed the memory if I had.
55:03SPEAKERApparently, it was a Game Boy cartridge port.
55:06SPEAKER- Yeah, so my assumption is that anytime I see something
55:09SPEAKERweird that connects to the Game Boy,
55:11SPEAKERI assume it's about Pokemon.
55:13SPEAKERSo I assume this was about getting your Pokemon
55:15SPEAKERoff of the Game Boy cartridge and onto the N64.
55:18SPEAKER- At this time, that is absolutely,
55:20SPEAKERthat has to be what that was for
55:21SPEAKERbecause this was the height of Pokemon Mania.
55:24SPEAKERAnd also, but that also kind of like prefigures
55:26SPEAKERthe Game Boy player on the GameCube later,
55:28SPEAKERwhich was like a full sort of Game Boy emulator player
55:32SPEAKERthat you could plug cartridges into.
55:33SPEAKERBut it is worth mentioning that since they were shipping
55:37SPEAKERgames on cartridges, a lot of those games
55:39SPEAKERcould save directly to the cart as well.
55:41SPEAKERYou didn't have to have that memory pack for everything.
55:43SPEAKER- But as the console generation wore on, that changed
55:47SPEAKER'cause they stopped putting the batteries
55:49SPEAKERin those cartridges.
55:50SPEAKER- So interestingly, not all of them use batteries, some do.
55:54SPEAKER- Oh.
55:54SPEAKER- I ran into this when I was on my quest
55:56SPEAKERto dump all of my old cart saves a couple of years ago.
55:59SPEAKERAnd I think it even varied within games in some cases.
56:02SPEAKERI think there were some games
56:03SPEAKERthat shipped multiple versions of cartridges.
56:05SPEAKERSome shipped, I forget which is the one
56:07SPEAKERthat needs a battery, is it?
56:08SPEAKERI think it's SRAM is the one that needs a battery.
56:10SPEAKERAnd then some had EPROMs or flash memory
56:13SPEAKERthat did not need a battery
56:14SPEAKERand those would last functionally forever.
56:17SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, that's wild.
56:18SPEAKER- But the battery backed ones
56:19SPEAKERstill had the lifespan of decades
56:22SPEAKERthat those tend to come with.
56:23SPEAKERAll my carts still had their data on them.
56:27SPEAKERI wanna say there are cases where some games,
56:29SPEAKERlike maybe Majora or some games may be shipped,
56:32SPEAKERdepending on like when you bought it,
56:33SPEAKERmight have a battery in it or might have EPROM.
56:36SPEAKER- That's wild.
56:37SPEAKER- Yeah.
56:38SPEAKER- Was Nintendo still manufacturing
56:40SPEAKERall the cartridges at this point?
56:41SPEAKER- I don't know.
56:42SPEAKERThat's a good question 'cause that was definitely
56:44SPEAKERlike a serious sticking point early for Nintendo
56:47SPEAKERis that they insisted on making all the cartridges
56:49SPEAKERthemselves, which was I'm sure a very healthy
56:52SPEAKERrevenue driver for all their third parties
56:54SPEAKERto have to pay for.
56:56SPEAKERBut I don't know if that was still in effect
56:57SPEAKERat this point or not.
56:59SPEAKER- I also, I don't know that there were,
57:00SPEAKERI went looking to see if there were other weird
57:03SPEAKERexpansion slot devices and I didn't find anything.
57:05SPEAKERI was kind of surprised 'cause like it seemed like
57:08SPEAKERa juicy target for third party manufacturers
57:10SPEAKERmaking weird stuff.
57:11SPEAKER- No, I'm sure there were all of your kind of standard
57:14SPEAKERthird party memory cards and that sort of thing.
57:16SPEAKERBut I never really played a lot of games
57:18SPEAKERthat needed the memory pack so I never fiddled
57:20SPEAKERwith that stuff.
57:21SPEAKERThere was also famously it had the console
57:23SPEAKERhad the disk drive port on the bottom
57:24SPEAKERand Nintendo did make the 64DD in Japan
57:28SPEAKERwhich was supposed to come here and never did
57:29SPEAKERwhich was a magnetic disk drive.
57:32SPEAKER- Yeah, it was kind of analogous to zip drive.
57:35SPEAKERThey were like 65 megabyte, 64 megabyte drives.
57:40SPEAKERLike that port, it's funny, that port was on the bottom
57:42SPEAKERof the console.
57:45SPEAKERThey didn't really tell us what it was for for a long time.
57:47SPEAKER- Yeah, that is such standard Nintendo practice.
57:50SPEAKERLike every one of their consoles has at least one port
57:52SPEAKERon the bottom that's just like feature port, serial port.
57:55SPEAKERLike they never kind of tell you why until and unless
57:58SPEAKERthey put out something that uses it
57:59SPEAKERwhich they often did not in the US.
58:02SPEAKER- So the TLDR on the disk cartridges
58:05SPEAKERwas that they were slower than the ROM cartridges
58:09SPEAKERbut faster than the 4X CD ROMs
58:11SPEAKERthat were in the current generation of consoles.
58:13SPEAKER- Yeah, and had writable area on them
58:15SPEAKERso you could do interesting stuff
58:17SPEAKERin the all of like nine games they made for that thing.
58:21SPEAKER- I also, I didn't realize that they also included a ROM
58:26SPEAKERso that to run the boot code for the console off of
58:29SPEAKERwhich was interesting.
58:30SPEAKER- Yeah, this is, I probably should have mentioned this
58:33SPEAKERduring the hardware design part.
58:34SPEAKERIt was interesting to me to find out that the N64
58:37SPEAKERdoesn't have a BIOS, it doesn't expose
58:38SPEAKERany kind of BIOS functionality that instead
58:41SPEAKEReach game runs a tiny microkernel
58:43SPEAKERthat exposes a lot of the system functionality.
58:46SPEAKER- And when you say tiny, how it's like 16 kilobytes
58:49SPEAKERor 75 kilobytes or something?
58:51SPEAKER- I don't think the, I don't know if the article mentioned
58:53SPEAKERwhat kind of resources it takes up but it did.
58:56SPEAKERAnd I mean, that's effectively a little operating system
58:58SPEAKERrunning in each game off of each game cartridge
59:00SPEAKERbut the resources were constrained enough
59:03SPEAKERthat if apparently if you didn't need certain functionality
59:06SPEAKERthat that kernel provided, you could strip it down
59:07SPEAKERto remove those functions to save space.
59:10SPEAKER- It was a different time back then.
59:11SPEAKER- It definitely was.
59:13SPEAKERReal quick, just to close the loop on the 64DD,
59:17SPEAKERthis is a fun historical artifact to me.
59:20SPEAKERNintendo was pretty big on copy protection,
59:21SPEAKERgoing back to the original NES,
59:23SPEAKERlike they were implementing cartridge copy protection
59:27SPEAKERall the way back and this system was no exception.
59:31SPEAKERNot counting the disk port, like the disk drive port.
59:34SPEAKERApparently they did not think to protect
59:36SPEAKERthe disk drive port according to the Copetti article
59:38SPEAKERand that's what enabled copier devices to be made
59:41SPEAKERthat used the disk drive port, such as the,
59:45SPEAKERsuch as the Dr. V64, which I feel like I remember
59:48SPEAKERseeing pictures of illicitly on the internet back in the day
59:51SPEAKERwhich was a giant white box that sticks
59:55SPEAKERto the bottom of the N64 and it has a CD-ROM in it.
59:58SPEAKER- Oh, it's also a burner.
59:59SPEAKER- Right, so you can, you can both dump games to CD
1:00:02SPEAKERand then also let's say go download a bunch of games
1:00:05SPEAKERoff the internet and play them on your N64.
1:00:08SPEAKER- Wild.
1:00:09SPEAKER- It was, it was a, it was the wild west for that stuff.
1:00:12SPEAKERYou want to talk about dev kits real quick before we go?
1:00:14SPEAKER- I just want to point out that they made nine games
1:00:16SPEAKERfor this and that four of them were Mario artist games.
1:00:19SPEAKER- Yeah, the 64 DD was not well supported.
1:00:21SPEAKER- One was Sim City 64, which I kind of want to load up
1:00:25SPEAKERon the mystery and try.
1:00:26SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, you know, the install base globally
1:00:31SPEAKERwas only 33 million, you know, I don't know
1:00:32SPEAKERwhat the fraction of that was in Japan,
1:00:34SPEAKERbut it could have been huge and then I'm sure they sold
1:00:36SPEAKERa very small fraction of that number in 64 DDs, so.
1:00:40SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:00:40SPEAKER- Probably not a lot of incentive to make games there.
1:00:43SPEAKER- I also want to know what the F-Zero expansion kit is.
1:00:46SPEAKERIt had a track editor, man, so you could make new tracks
1:00:48SPEAKERand share them with your friends.
1:00:50SPEAKERThat's wild.
1:00:51SPEAKER- They had ideas.
1:00:52SPEAKER- Yeah, big ideas.
1:00:55SPEAKER- The dev kit situation is fun here.
1:00:57SPEAKER- Yeah, so.
1:00:58SPEAKER- Which, which again is the, I've seen this in practice.
1:01:00SPEAKERLike I remember going to Sega to see full auto on the 360
1:01:03SPEAKERbefore the 360 came out and it was running on a gigantic
1:01:06SPEAKERindustrial looking box that was an old,
1:01:10SPEAKERpresumably an early 360 dev kit.
1:01:12SPEAKERLike it's consoles always, well, maybe not these days
1:01:14SPEAKERwith the way that everything is pretty standardized now,
1:01:16SPEAKERbut back in the day, it was like gigantic,
1:01:19SPEAKERextremely expensive development kit.
1:01:20SPEAKEREarly, the closer to launch you get,
1:01:22SPEAKERyou would get a smaller development kit.
1:01:24SPEAKEREventually you would get like consoles
1:01:26SPEAKERin the actual form factor that could run debug code.
1:01:29SPEAKER- I remember when the 360, when they were first showing
1:01:32SPEAKERthose games on the floor at E3,
1:01:34SPEAKERmost of the dev kits were still Mac G5s
1:01:39SPEAKERwith like four CPU's or something in 'em.
1:01:41SPEAKERIt was ridiculous.
1:01:43SPEAKER- It was the standard, the standard trade show thing
1:01:44SPEAKERfor like an unreleased console was that the controller cord
1:01:48SPEAKERwould just be leading under a table with big drapes
1:01:50SPEAKERaround it.
1:01:51SPEAKER- Or into a sealed box that you'd touch the side of it
1:01:54SPEAKERand it'd be hot.
1:01:55SPEAKER- Kind of generally hiding whatever the giant dev kit
1:01:58SPEAKERlooked like.
1:01:59SPEAKERAnyway, the original dev kits for the N64
1:02:01SPEAKERwere SGI Onyx workstations that, as you mentioned earlier,
1:02:05SPEAKERwent for a quarter of a million dollars a piece.
1:02:08SPEAKER- In 1993, just to be clear, they were expensive,
1:02:10SPEAKERlike unbelievably expensive.
1:02:13SPEAKER- Yes, later on, closer to release,
1:02:14SPEAKERthey got that down to an indie, an SGI indie workstation,
1:02:18SPEAKERwhich went for between five and 15,000 with a,
1:02:21SPEAKERI guess they were maybe still using the Ultra 64 name
1:02:24SPEAKERat this time, but there was effectively a card,
1:02:26SPEAKERthere was a daughterboard, an expansion card
1:02:28SPEAKERin those workstations that had the N64 hardware on it.
1:02:31SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:02:32SPEAKER- So you could run your game on actual hardware.
1:02:34SPEAKER- Yep.
1:02:34SPEAKER- I found a really neat little anecdote from,
1:02:37SPEAKERI've got the link in the show notes,
1:02:40SPEAKERto a game developer magazine post-mortem
1:02:42SPEAKERfrom like the late '90s on Star Wars Shadows of the Empire,
1:02:47SPEAKERbecause those original quarter of a million dollar
1:02:49SPEAKEROnyx machines were sort of simulating the target performance
1:02:52SPEAKERof the N64, and apparently they did a pretty good job
1:02:54SPEAKERof that, because the anecdote was that when LucasArts
1:02:58SPEAKERgot the cheaper workstations with the real hardware in it,
1:03:00SPEAKERand they were able to port Shadows of the Empire
1:03:02SPEAKERin like three days to the real hardware,
1:03:03SPEAKERand have it basically just work.
1:03:05SPEAKER- That's wild, I saw that in multiple places,
1:03:07SPEAKERthat story in multiple places also.
1:03:09SPEAKER- So apparently they were able to simulate the target,
1:03:13SPEAKERI think you would hear in later generations,
1:03:15SPEAKERyou would hear that that process was maybe not as clean,
1:03:17SPEAKERyou know, of like, oh, we're having to develop
1:03:20SPEAKERagainst the specs we've been provided,
1:03:22SPEAKERbut on much faster hardware, and so we aren't really sure
1:03:26SPEAKERexactly how well it's gonna run
1:03:27SPEAKERwhen we get the real hardware in,
1:03:28SPEAKERand then it comes in, and oops, we have maybe overshot
1:03:30SPEAKERa little bit on what this hardware can do.
1:03:32SPEAKER- Yeah, hey, we got a smooth 24.
1:03:34SPEAKER- And in fact, to that point, there was another fun anecdote
1:03:37SPEAKERfrom that LucasArts story, which is that they had
1:03:39SPEAKERan early version of Shadows of the Empire
1:03:41SPEAKERrunning on that Onyx, the big one.
1:03:44SPEAKERThey had the Hoth level running at 1280 by 1024,
1:03:46SPEAKER32-bit color, 60 frames a second.
1:03:49SPEAKER- Oh my God.
1:03:50SPEAKER- So they were playing a very nice version
1:03:52SPEAKERof the Hoth level from Shadows of the Empire
1:03:54SPEAKERon that $250,000 workstation, before they had to bust down
1:03:58SPEAKERthrough the real thing.
1:03:59SPEAKER- Look, at some point, we'll do an episode
1:04:00SPEAKERwhere we rate Hoth levels from a technical standpoint.
1:04:03SPEAKERThat was one of the better ones, as I recall.
1:04:04SPEAKER- Yes, that might be the defining Hoth level.
1:04:08SPEAKER- Yeah, the other interesting thing is eventually
1:04:11SPEAKERthey shipped a Windows dev kit much, much, much later
1:04:15SPEAKERthat seemed to, well, okay, much, much later,
1:04:19SPEAKERthe homebrew community came up with a bunch of weird
1:04:21SPEAKERdev kit solutions that included cartridges with wires
1:04:25SPEAKERhanging out of them that you plug into the back of your PC,
1:04:27SPEAKERstuff like that.
1:04:28SPEAKER- Yeah, that was pretty standard at the time.
1:04:30SPEAKERYou can read about, there was a similar,
1:04:31SPEAKERthere's kind of a legendary homebrew SNES dev kit
1:04:34SPEAKERthat came out at the height of the SNES
1:04:36SPEAKERthat is the same thing of, like, oh,
1:04:38SPEAKERNintendo dev kits for SNES are extremely expensive,
1:04:41SPEAKERbut what if we made one at a tiny fraction of the cost
1:04:43SPEAKERthat we have kind of reverse engineered and cobbled together,
1:04:46SPEAKERbut a lot of developers got their start
1:04:47SPEAKERon stuff like that then.
1:04:49SPEAKER- That's how the, what was it, the Doom port
1:04:51SPEAKERfor the SNES was made on one of those,
1:04:53SPEAKERI recall? - I believe that's right.
1:04:54SPEAKERI believe that's right.
1:04:56SPEAKERBut yeah, there were a bunch of weird solutions,
1:04:58SPEAKERincluding some people that used the bottom port,
1:05:00SPEAKERthe disk drive port for debug purposes as well.
1:05:04SPEAKERIt's, I don't know, it's real, it's weird.
1:05:07SPEAKERIt's real weird.
1:05:08SPEAKERThe N64 was weird and interesting and like,
1:05:12SPEAKERI don't know, it was the last of the consoles
1:05:15SPEAKERthat I went out and like drove around town looking for.
1:05:18SPEAKERThe rest of them, I would do a pre-order
1:05:19SPEAKERor wait in line or whatever,
1:05:21SPEAKERand it has a special place in my heart
1:05:24SPEAKERbecause of that, I think.
1:05:25SPEAKER- I remember, it might be the most obsessed
1:05:30SPEAKERI have ever been with getting my hands on a console.
1:05:31SPEAKERIt's basically that and the PlayStation one.
1:05:33SPEAKERLike that was, that was right in the heyday
1:05:35SPEAKERof I was like mowing every yard I could find and doing.
1:05:37SPEAKERThat's the N64 is the one I black topped that driveway for
1:05:40SPEAKERthat I've mentioned.
1:05:41SPEAKERLike I remember, I think it was Toys R Us
1:05:44SPEAKERexclusively got demo kiosks.
1:05:46SPEAKERI think they were the only ones.
1:05:47SPEAKERAnd I remember just like racing to Toys R Us
1:05:50SPEAKERas fast as I could to play Mario 64
1:05:52SPEAKERlike a week or two before it went on sale.
1:05:55SPEAKER- It was, it was the end of college for me.
1:05:57SPEAKERSo like I was a junior in college, I think when I got it.
1:06:01SPEAKERAnd it was, it was, I didn't live in a dorm anymore.
1:06:04SPEAKERSo I missed the dorm experience with N64,
1:06:06SPEAKERbut it was very much a people come over to the apartment
1:06:09SPEAKERand play like we're stoked to play N64 games.
1:06:12SPEAKERAnd the controllers were expensive enough
1:06:13SPEAKERthat everybody bought their own controller,
1:06:15SPEAKERbrought their own controller.
1:06:16SPEAKERSo like, even if they didn't have a console,
1:06:19SPEAKERcouple of my friends had N64 controllers.
1:06:21SPEAKERSo when they came over we could play Mario Kart
1:06:22SPEAKERor Diddy Kong or whatever, whatever it happened to be.
1:06:27SPEAKERIt was a good time.
1:06:27SPEAKERWe played a lot of GoldenEye, man.
1:06:29SPEAKER- It had its ups and downs.
1:06:30SPEAKERObviously there were bottlenecks, you know,
1:06:32SPEAKERthe cartridge choice was maybe not the right choice
1:06:35SPEAKERin retrospect, that's debatable.
1:06:37SPEAKERBut you know, like I'm glad to know what roughly
1:06:40SPEAKERfrom a broad perspective was going on
1:06:43SPEAKERunder the hood of that thing now.
1:06:44SPEAKER- Yeah, it's, look, this is the magic of time
1:06:47SPEAKERis that the things that once were secret
1:06:49SPEAKERand you had to pay it by an expensive dev kit
1:06:50SPEAKERto understand now is just posted on the internet
1:06:52SPEAKERthat somebody who cares a lot took time to write about.
1:06:56SPEAKER- And you know, like pretty impressive design.
1:06:58SPEAKERLike again, there's like a fair amount of stuff
1:07:00SPEAKERin this thing that seems pretty forward looking
1:07:02SPEAKERbased on seeing how the next few years after this went.
1:07:06SPEAKER- Yep, yeah.
1:07:06SPEAKERWe didn't get shiny metal in video games on PC
1:07:08SPEAKERfor a good five, six years after this.
1:07:13SPEAKERI guess that'll do it for us this week.
1:07:15SPEAKERAs always, thanks everybody for supporting the show.
1:07:17SPEAKERWe appreciate you.
1:07:19SPEAKERWe are listener supporters.
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1:07:23SPEAKERAnd if you wanna find out how you can support the show,
1:07:25SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techpod.
1:07:28SPEAKERAgain, that's patreon.com/techpod,
1:07:30SPEAKERwhere for $5 a month, you get access to the Discord,
1:07:33SPEAKERyou get access to the Patreon exclusive episodes,
1:07:36SPEAKERand you get to talk to a bunch of interesting people
1:07:38SPEAKERabout the stuff that we care about,
1:07:40SPEAKERlike weird old consoles and why the MIPS processor
1:07:44SPEAKERin the N64 was better than the MIPS processor
1:07:47SPEAKERin the PlayStation 1.
1:07:50SPEAKERI assume the console wars will be alive and friendly,
1:07:53SPEAKERI hope, in the channel discussing this episode this week.
1:07:58SPEAKERBut as always, a very special thank you
1:08:00SPEAKERgoes out to our executive producer, to your patrons,
1:08:04SPEAKERincluding Infelicitous Rips, Jordan Lippett,
1:08:07SPEAKERlet's see, Bunny Emoji, Demon Emoji,
1:08:12SPEAKERDavid Allen and James Kamik.
1:08:13SPEAKERThank you all so much.
1:08:14SPEAKER- Thank you.
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1:08:19SPEAKERWe'll be back next week with another edition
1:08:20SPEAKERof The Tech Pod.
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