A Better Life for the Nintendo 64

[mrmolecule]

The Nintendo 64 was plagued with many problems, because it was that console in that Nintendo lost its "unambiguous leader" position in the industry. Here's the facts.

1. Cartridges were expensive to produce and didn't hold as much as CDs. However, they were harder to pirate, were very durable, and also fast-loading.
2. The N64 also banked on the 64DD, which was for all intents and purposes, never really "released". Sure, it was officially released...in December 1999...in Japan.
3. No console add-ons were really successful. The FDS was the most successful...reaching 50% of those with a console. However, the same couldn't be said for others...like the Sega CD...
4. Even in the late 1990s, Zip disks could hold up to 100MB and were relatively cheap to buy even in retail. Why Nintendo went for their own, I don't know.
5. The N64 cartridges started at 8MB and ultimately ended up 64MB. The 64DD carts started at 64MB. Who said 64DD carts couldn't get to, say 512MB?
6. In fact, why didn't they just make the DD the main console and scrap an add-on? Games would come on the DD disks, and the console would have modem and clock capabilities from the beginning. And internal storage, making disk-switching for things like Banjo-Kazooie (to Banjo-Tooie), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (to Ura Zelda), and F-Zero (to F-Zero Expansion Kit) a snap. And multiple-disk games could exist too!

I think making the N64 BE the DD would've probably saved Nintendo.

[Fryguy64]

There would have been a reason why the 64DD was delayed by many years and eventually saw a limited release. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a technical reason, or perhaps the components were still too expensive in 1996 but became affordable by 1999 (with Nintendo's thing about hardware making a profit as well as software).

The reason, I believe, that Nintendo stuck with cartridges is that they are expandable. As you stated, they started at 8MB and ended up 64MB. You can stick chips in a cart. You can make them better over the lifetime of a console.

They may have been able to do the same thing with 64DD disks, what with them being a custom Nintendo format and all that, but what makes you think they would have started at 64MB in 1996? Much more likely they would have started much lower, perhaps with no more capacity than N64 carts.

If by 1999 we had 64MB 64DD disks, and the system had been in development for years by that point, that was probably the best they could do.

Besides, the N64 did alright off the Pokemon franchise, Goldeneye and other Rare games. It just didn't do nearly as well as the CD based PlayStation which had a significantly higher storage capacity from scratch, and that didn't actually need to expand a lot before the system was on its last legs.

[mrmolecule]

Somewhere I read that when Nintendo was still flaunting the DD, they announced that the disks would be 64MB (1997, maybe?). However, I agree, in 1996, if the DD was the standard, SM64 would still be 8MB.