Nintendo 64
The Nintendo 64 is a game console released in 1996 as the first 64-bit console. In the early 1990s Silicon Graphics was approached by Nintendo and with their assistance the Nintendo 64, powered by a MIPS VR4300 CPU and several custom co-processors produced by SGI was released. SGI provided the SDK for the Nintendo 64 as well as the microcode for the Reality Display Processor (RDP) and Reality Signal Processor (RSP) chips.
Specifications
| CPU | VR3000 | 93.75MHz |
| Graphics/Sound | RSP | 62.5MHz |
| RAM | RAMBUS RDRAM | 4M (Expandable to 8M) |
The VR4300 is a modified MIPS R4200 CPU designed for low end embedded applications and licensed to NEC by SGI. It is a full 64-bit design connected to a 32-bit system bus and running o32 ABI code.
The RCP is split into the RSP and RDP. The RSP is responsible for matrix math, shading, clipping and audio processing. It is a MIPS R4000 with modifications for SIMD. The RDP contains 4Kb of texture memory, and is responsible for Z-buffering, antialiasing, texturing and color combining/blending.
The RDRAM used by the Nintendo 64 connects through a 16-bit bus and while it's reasonably fast and performant, it has high latency requiring planning and timing to ensure calculations do not get stalled.
Development Kit
SGI provided the Nintendo 64 "Emulator Kit" which can be attached to an SGI Indy XL/8 or XL/24. It contains a miniaturized Nintendo 64 and a controller board that went out the back of the Indy. The 5.3/6.2 releases of IRIX are required for operation.
