Nintendo 64 audioNintendo 64 had an interesting way of doing sound. It had a
MIPS R4300 CPU, a "Reality Co-Processor" (mainly a graphics chip, but I think it did more than just graphics), 4 megabytes of unified
Rambus RAM, and game cartriges with 4 to 64 MB of
ROM (most used 8 to 16). No sound chip, no sound
RAM, not much
ROM, so for
N64 to make sound, the developer had to cut into the fairly plentiful non-sound resources.
Developers without
imagination just let their games sound bad. But those who had made their
N64 games sound great.
1080 Snowboarding had very fitting
metal,
rap,
techno and narration.
Perfect Dark used
MP3 compression and several megabytes of
ROM to give its characters a movie's worth of dialogue. The
Mario games had hum-able tunes and the
Zelda games had sound effects for every occasion.
Factor 5 created and leased the
MORT codec so
N64 games could play voice samples compressed 12:1 without using much CPU time. They used it in
Rogue Squadron,
Battle for Naboo,
Pokemon Stadium 2 and I believe
Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. And despite taking clock cycles and bytes out of the system, the above mentioned are some of
N64's best playing and best looking games.
So
N64 could do great sound. But, in order to accomodate everyone,
Nintendo has built their latest console
Gamecube with a 1.5 GB optical drive, 43 MB of
RAM, a dedicated sound chip and a 485 MHz
PowerPC CPU. With all that, developers can record music for games just as they do for
CD players, and store it all in
RAM so the
lens can be free to load new game data during play.