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- Nintendo 64 Game Pak (part number NUS-006) is the brand name of the consumer ROM cartridge product that stores game data for the Nintendo 64, released in 1996. As with Nintendo's previous consoles, the Game Pak's design tradeoffs were intended to achieve maximal system speed and minimal base console cost—with lesser storage space and a higher unit cost per game. Integrating a CD-ROM drive, with its expensive and slow moving parts, would have drastically increased the console's price and reduced its performance. As with the Famicom Disk System floppy drive of the 1980s, Nintendo's strategy with the Nintendo 64 had always been to develop a higher-capacity and cheaper medium to complement the Game Pak. This strategy resulted in the 64DD, a floppy drive which was launched two years late in 1999 and only in Japan, leaving it as a commercial failure and the Game Pak as the Nintendo 64's sole storage medium. From the console's first year from late 1996 through 1997, Game Pak sizes are 4 to 12 megabytes with a typical third party retail price of US$75.99 (equivalent to about $130 in 2021), then reaching 32 megabytes in 1998, and finally 64 megabytes from 1999 onward. Some developers such as Factor 5, Rare, and Nintendo, were fanatically supportive of the high-speed solid-state medium because it is the most effective solution to the universal video game development problem of having preciously limited system RAM. A few developers had vastly heavier designs, especially the cinematic full-motion video of Square's Final Fantasy VII (1997)—but sufficient data compression techniques had not yet been invented and ROM chips were not yet capacious and affordable—so they reluctantly had to _target CD-ROM based platforms instead. Many developers preferred the cheaper and more rapid prototyping software development time of cartridge, and others the quicker and cheaper final delivery of the retail CD-ROM disc product. Some development teams eventually achieved ingenious software tactics to avail of the slowly increasing Game Pak ROM sizes, such as the more than 90 minutes of real-time rendered cinematic scenes in the 32-megabyte The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) or the two CDs worth of pre-rendered full motion video converted to the 64-megabyte Resident Evil 2 (1999), one of the most ambitious console ports of all time. The Nintendo 64 is the last major home console to have cartridge as its primary storage format until the release of the Nintendo Switch in 2017. Portable systems such as the PlayStation Vita, Nintendo DS, and Nintendo 3DS also use cartridges. (en)
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- Open and unopened N64 Game Pak (en)
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- Nintendo 64 Game Pak (en)
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- We use the cartridge almost like normal RAM... So the cartridge technology really saved the day. (en)
- When we discussed designing the field scenes as illustrations or CG based, we came up with the idea to eliminate the connection between movies and the fields. Without using blackout at all, and maintaining quality at the same time, we would make the movie stop at one cut and make the characters move around on it. We tried to make it controllable even during the movies. As a result of using a lot of motion data + CG effects and in still images, it turned out to be a mega capacity game, and therefore we had to choose CD-ROM as our media. [In] other words, we became too aggressive, and got ourselves into trouble. (en)
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- — Factor 5 (en)
- — Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy series (en)
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- Nintendo 64 Game Pak (part number NUS-006) is the brand name of the consumer ROM cartridge product that stores game data for the Nintendo 64, released in 1996. As with Nintendo's previous consoles, the Game Pak's design tradeoffs were intended to achieve maximal system speed and minimal base console cost—with lesser storage space and a higher unit cost per game. Integrating a CD-ROM drive, with its expensive and slow moving parts, would have drastically increased the console's price and reduced its performance. (en)
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- Nintendo 64 Game Pak (en)
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