Question about the ultra 64

[112]

Its kind of ridiculous how a cartridge has to load, games such as Kevin Keegan football manager (snes), Batman and Robin (MD) all had this same problem. Gunrock whats the deal woth the N64s muddy / murky textures? Its evident in all games.

112

[vertigo]

Not really. If you can fit your game into 128Mbits (16MBytes) if it's compressed, but uncompressed it has to go into a 256Mbit (32MBytes) ROM chip, you're far more likely to compress it and have a few seconds of decompression time than to go for the outlay of anoter very expensive 16Meg of mask ROM.

Muddy/murky textures afaik were mainly down to a combination of the following factors: small texture RAM, low resolution output, the hardware anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing IMO is only really effective at resolutions of 640x480 and upwards. Otherwise because the final output resolution is so low (320x240 most of the time), you end up with a fairly blurry end result. This is why I think if the N64 had 8MB of system RAM as standard from the start, graphically it would have stood up much better.

[Leon Retro]

With the N64 the designers had to really take in to account the limitations of the machine when creating the visuals. Some games were too ambitious and suffered from looking messy, whilst the more simple looking games tended to look cleaner and sharper.

Mario64 was the perfect example of a game that played to the machines strengths. It didn't have complicated textures or geometry, but everything looked bright, fairly crisp- and clean!

Some devcos tried too hard and ended-up creating very messy looking titles!