EEVblog #491 - Nintendo 64 Game Console Teardown

hi welcome to tear down Tuesday no I'm not going to tear down a blue rubber ESD mat I'm going to tear down a Nintendo 64 which I have been reliably told has been sitting in my mailbag for quite some time so let's go up here to the mailbag shelf and have a look shall we I think it's going to be this puppy down here ah lost a couple down the back of the bench ah hang on got to retrieve him and here it is I guess you could call this a combined at my Oh bag slash tear down it is from Dave Cheney from Ashfield thank you very much Dave don't need my knife for this it's got one of these convenient ripoff things and hope I got the right package otherwise we're just doing a mail bag yep here it is hey nintendo64 beauty aha check out that a retro goodness hmm hi Dave I've really enjoyed your teardown tuesday segments especially ones that focus on older years someone was throwing out this n64 unit I thought it would make an interesting subject for a teardown I'm sure it will thank you very much Dave he's from Sydney as well and put on Nintendo 64 dave has that told me on Twitter that um it doesn't work so what what's what's this in here is it that mean that's the cartridge slot I don't know I've never used a Nintendo 64 never had one um I don't know what that is at all sure or you gamer aficionados are screaming at me right about now I know that is it's probably even written on the front there we go memory expansion huh and it looks like it's missing its AC adapter as well and that's a rather neat look at that they've got a big recess in there which plugs in it is a 3.3 volts at 2.7 amps and 12 volts at 0.88 amps for ages 8 and up its lucky lucky I'm old of the night or the wife tells me I'm about four years old but there you go multi out little custom connected down in there and we've got ourselves like a custom slot I believe this was the last of the slot based video games at least from Nintendo anyway after this they moved to our CDs and if you want to know some of the facts and figures on the n64 it is Nintendo's our fifth gaming console and released in 1996 well discontinued in 2003 so it had a 6 year lifespan or there abouts although I'm sure right at the end of its lifespan it wasn't our popular that's why they discontinued it of course and they've sold over almost 33 million of these little puppies worldwide absolutely incredible and on the bottom side here under a slot we have an expansion connector it almost looks like it's perfectly in line with the one on the top and the same type so I wonder if there are why and in parallel or not I guess we'll find out when the crack when we crack the thing open unfortunately I don't like the look of the screws in this thing and check out that evil piece of work right there some bastard manager at Nintendo decided we don't want people getting into these we'll put a security screw on there look at that it's almost like a like a inside-out talks or something like that it's got little grooves around the edges like that I mean it's not too hard to make a tool to get into that I mean you could you know hack a flathead or something to go in either side of that I guess but yeah what a what a pain in the ass along with all the custom connectors and everything on this thing no na let's put in we don't want any bastard playing with this thing let's use a security screw bastards and I've got a bit like this which might involve in theory could fit but I think it's a bit too fat on the end there so don't like my chances it turns out I can actually get in there with the pair of pliers and little needle nose pliers and turn that around it's going to take a while ha ha ah bugger it screw this well it turns out that there are only our two bastard screws on that thing that I had to drill out so didn't do any lasting damage they're not going to reuse this thing of course it is non-working but uh that wouldn't you can always tape it back together nothing you can't fix a little bit of tape and yeah I just sit it there like that not a problem so let's lift the skirt on this thing and see what's is a bit of dust no did cockroaches no jeez not much in here at all that's pretty much what I expected we got to wait take all this metal work off of course they've done all this it's a hell of a lot of shielding on there that's a really built in braces stuff I mean what unbelievable but yeah very simplistic I don't expect much on here except I under this when we lifted up I expect to see the main CPU the GPU secondary processor and really not much else nice and glue logic and other stuff I don't even know if I there's going to be any power supply because it was 3.3 volts directly in here which powers the main logic I'm sure just maybe through some common mode chokes or something like that but yeah I don't expect a huge amount in this thing at all it'll be very very simplistic you watch and of course it look you know it's super rugged the build of this thing you know jeez you're gonna practically run over this thing with a truck and I don't think it's going to cause an issue so let's pop all this metal work off and have a look actually I'm a kind of guess that this top plate on here is acting as a heat sink effectively because I can't see any mechanical purpose for it really if you have a look at the case that's just sort of you know it slots on there like that and there are these vent holes there which are essentially just over that I mean there's no fan in this thing sure I've never used one not sure how hot these things got but yeah I mean there's a lot of screws on there so likes and maybe um there's some little heat sink art blocks inside which help get the hair spread the heat transfer the heat out to this external metal worker that's all passively cooled and of course with this sort of uh consumer product as well they would have known very well that's um dust there and they would have known very well that they were going to sell like ten million or so of these things or you know what if they definitely would have known it would sell in its millions even if it was a I guess a failure you could call it but they you know when you start talking about that sort of volume you really design your products with manufacturing in mind DFM design for manufacturing um I'm not sure in what all of these screws come off actually so I'll just take them all off I guess and yeah so it's all about DFM design for manufacturing so I mean all this all this metal work isn't ER necessarily yeah cheeps I only do it if you have to but of course they you know how to to pass all the EMC requirements and stuff but yeah they've gone well let's passively cool this thing and not worry about a fan and all that sort of stuff and system integration of course as I said I expect to see the two main chips in here the main CPU and the graphics chip and that and pretty much the rest is just you know just really cheapo stuff so they've would have put a lot of system engineering into this thing and we'll talk about the GPU in a minute and let's get all this off geez should have got my electric screwdriver out for this one now you can tell they're taking EMC compliance very seriously by the way that they've gone to the trouble to manufacture in this bracket here which then just that that wipe on there just connects the shield of the socket in there to the main chazzy down here so if they're shielding that socket really will really well they've gone to quite a bit of effort in there but they've even put those uh key in studs in there two screws to hold it down there's an extra manufacturing step with two screws and yeah they've really decided that they have to do that because if they do you know you could have optimized this out you know if you your first units came off the manufacturing line or something like that and you notice that there's well even sort of a pre-production now type run you might have done your basic EMC tests on this thing with them without this bracket and well if you didn't need it well you know take it out but obviously made it into the final production version so you know if you could you would shave a couple of cents off there and you'll notice the main connector down in there how there's what is it there's two four five pins which stick up higher than all the others and that they're on both sides of course they would be a ground contacts designed to are mate first before all the other pins and that just gives you a bit more consistency in terms of your right user hot swapping of these are modules you know it it you know that if you know that your ground contacts are going to connect first in your cartridge then you've got a known condition to work on for your hot swappable hot plug design and if this thing is a heat sink and it certainly does a seam to serve no other purpose then heat sink and they really haven't gilded the lily on this they haven't really gone to town because it's not a multiple fin heat sink like this because it's all about the surface area without heat sinkers and and yeah so they're really you know that's just very basic art form they've just you know just form that thing very simple instead of like a a machined aluminium block which is much more expensive in production so maybe some compromise there maybe yeah the design team said all we need some more heat sinking and you know the bean counters are going well how much does that cost war I'd love to use a black ended poised you know thinned extruded aluminium heatsink and they went too much cost too much no could we just go for a bit of folded aluminium like that or a year kind of it'll be okay I guess let me run the numbers again and you know they come back and well that's what they've decided to go with so here we go we're almost almost there I think I do have to get those out as well holding down the connector not sure yeah yeah that's probably it we've got some really extra long screws in there so that should now hopefully tada lift out and we'll get shielding on the bottom of course as well but all this should a prise apart there we go a few passes on the bottom not a huge amount see a couple of transistors or they marked Rd diodes couple of out yeah not much but just some general wire bypassing and and lots of main power traces here used it look we've got a nice low impedance path there with lots of veers around here and here so they're obviously getting that power across there but - there we go let's um it looks like yeah we've got power here routed down to the mechanical switch on the front so that is a good clunking well it's a cheap-ass sliding switch I sense a good clunking mechanicals which is not just a cheap-ass contact slider so nothing special there but yeah we've got our passives in well let me try and flip this metalwork on the top off and tada here we go I can see some extra metal under there where all those screws plugged in and aha tada look at that I was a hundred percent right there that was there clearly got these um aluminium blocks on there there we go as our I know compound on the bottom there they just yet they they're not the glue type they've just stuck those down Oh get off there we go not a problem and they've done that oh and their memory as well they've heat sunk the memory there we go must be screaming along at a rate of megahertz and that's it that's pretty much what I expected the to chip solution we'll have a look at with the macro lens but we're going to have the CPU and the graphics chip on us or which ones what yet we've got our memory memory expansion socket right here you know they're trying to you know you can argue what there are thing here you know optional extra they're trying to sell it they could have put that memory on the mainboard but of course it keeps the price point down and gives you an extra retail sale as well some sort of upsell with these things of course with the memory slot but that was looks like it's just tied in there there's nothing special doesn't look to be any protection in that at all actually no there's bypassing on the back but there's no like you know there's no protection in on the inputs there at all it just looks like it hooks straight onto the memory bus there but yeah they were transferring the heat directly out of these devices straight onto that heatsink there and a few miscellaneous stuff around here we'll take a look at but that is pretty much it and that's what you'd expect in a you know when you manufacture things in the millions something like this you want to get down to a coupler chip solution absolute bare-bones stuff and of course the other thing which is notable in its absence from this entire design is any wiring whatsoever this thing rolls off the assembly line of course are the well they look like they're wave yet they look like they're wave soldered everything sir wave soldered so that's fully machine assembled even the main connector over here possibly I do I don't know but yeah basically that rolls off the assembly line even if there is the odd thing which is hand soldered but then they pretty much just bang pop it straight into the box and that's it now apparently there were a lot of versions of this board actually produced for various art markets and some chips weren't fitted and some were combined various things and stuff like that so I'm not exactly sure which version I've got here so what forgive me if I get it wrong but let's take a look at some of the individual chips on here and by the way date code on this thing up 1997 our early weeks 97 and first up we've got ourselves an amp nuts a MP in US and US art stands for nintendo ultimate 64 so you'll see that branded on every single one of these chips presumably that's an audio amp you can see the larger caps around that couple in that now of course some this whether or not it's a fully custom chip for nintendo or whether not it's a nerd just a relay board off the shelf on I don't know but every single chip in this almost every chip is that re labeled with Neuss and moving up here we have a non-us branded chip and it's a 94 atf it's actually a BU 94 ATF and that's a 16-bit stereo audio DAC so that one of course is just driving the main ampere and that's where you get your stereo audio from and I haven't researched into what these two jumpers are here they look like a surface mount cap but they're actually labeled JP 4 and JP 5 and as you can see the pins are shorted together like that and if we spin the board around here near the 94 atf we have a d inc nuts which is actually a video DAC a combined video DAC and video encoder hence DAC encoder I guess that stands for there and I believe this one was only fitted to the power only modules either or something else was fitted for the NTSC or they didn't have it at all presumably they fitted another type in there and we have ourselves our main clocks here these are MX 8 double 3 oh by the way are many data sheets for these will be linked in to the notes down below and they take your basic 3 4 megahertz a crystal oscillator and depending on the pinstriping configuration can either multiply that by 4 times 14 or 717 times 4 so to give you an output in the order of at 200 megahertz it's a ram bus clock generator and the RAM here is I come standard with four megabytes and additional four megabytes in the RAM expansion pack and these are actually our RAM bus chips so once again I have you know custom branded with the Nintendo name and part number they're working up to what five hundred megahertz with a peak bandwidth according to Wikipedia of five hundred and sixty two point five megabytes per second pretty darn quick and here's the main processor it's the CPU in us a and this one's actually 64-bit NEC VR 4300 which is the derivative of the MIPS technology our 4300 I and yes it was actually manufactured by NEC for Nintendo and this one was actually clocked at ninety three point seven five megahertz and this made it one of the most powerful were consoles of its day of course but yeah if it had like a six year hour time frame by the time it got to the end of it and not so crash on and also limited in terms of gameplay with the cartridge based system basically you simply could not fit as much data as you could on a DVD based systems which are also out at the time and although this is a 64-bit processor I believe they actually used it mostly in 32-bit mode which made for a more compact memory structure and stuff like that so they could fit more into your lousy four megabytes of memory or your eight with the expansion cartridge so and so most of the time they weren't utilizing the full 64-bit potential of this CPU and here's the graphics process of the RCP or reality coprocessor module actually are designed by SGI in conjunction with nintendo and it runs at sixty two point five megahertz and it's got two modules inside one is the reality drawing a processor great name the rdp and their reality signal processor or RSP woohoo end up both of these i communicate with the other modules firing into an 128 bit data bus at one gig the bytes per second so pretty darn quick no wonder they needed the heatsink block on there and not spreading that heat out because this thing probably got a bit warm now the RSP inside here or the reality signal processor is actually in reality a MIPS our 4000 based integer vector processor and that did various stuff in terms of lighting and transforms and things like that and then the RDP the reality display processor is the rasterizer and that handles all the z-buffer computation and all that stuff if you're into your gaming graphics architecture and that RSP part of it can also do the audio as well but apparently the main CPU can do audio so depending on how you program this sucker how you program your individual game you can get the graphics coprocessor to do the audio or you can't ask that to the main processor and of course the graphics on this thing are sixteen point eight million colors so no slouch they're only a lousy 640 by 480 pixels but I guess that was you know not bad in its day but of course a very old school these days and then we've got our piff nuts which is the peripheral interface our chip and that handles or the peripheral stuff as the name says the controllers and that sort of stuff but it also contains some sort of security in there as well so you can't play back games from a different region so I don't know about hacks on the Nintendo and that's 64 but if you get a hack it that's probably where a lot of the actions going to happen that looks like it Texas Instruments part I'm not entirely sure what that sucker is but it's obviously tied into the peripheral interface chip somehow there we go we do have a 5 volt rail in this thing that powered from a bog-standard 7805 regulator using the PCB as a heatsink their direct from the 12 volt input so that couldn't be drawing you know a huge amount of power there obviously with that sort of heatsink and the 7 volt drop on that thing it's not like it's got to be driving an amp or something like that now you might think this main socket here would be soldered in but you'd be wrong ah tada look at that it's actually just socket it just pulls out like that they've got lots of RFI contacts along there which go down to the main pads on the mainboard but the bottom connector down in there is the one that's actually soldered the expansion connector on the back look at that and look at all the ugly flux residue on that thing they've hand soldered that one so yeah they must be really confident with the wiping action inside that socket I mean this is the main cartridge one it's going to get you know an absolute pounding from my these kids just sleaze gamer kiddies just slamming these cartridges in and out like crazy so what yeah that's a that's really actually are quite surprising although once again if you did that maybe they've done that deliberately because if you use solder joints you're going to actually apply our stress to them you're going to make sure your connectors designed well to sort of take the stress off the pins but in this case it probably you know it might actually be rather clever in that you know they slam down the cartridge and you're not in fear of actually breaking anything you know cracking a a solder joint do do WA you know stress and shock so yeah that could be a rather clever design and of course there's nothing in way of protection for that expansion bus at all just you know it flows straight into the main chip there nothing doing someone was a fan of their nice curved traces there look at that ah they've mixed and matched look at that that one's got a that one's got a 45 angle on that the Resta nice and smooth so the electrons just race nice and smoothly around the bend there oh yeah actually there wouldn't be any Doppler shift noise because they'd be you moving so slow at that drift velocity rate ah crawling along and as we said at the start really nothing doing on the bottom here like this main graphic chip there and they've got a huge amount of izing they're real low inductive a high current dirt path for the main chipping that probably working it that would be direct from the three point three oh here it is even look little arrows 3.3 volts there it is Wizards down here Oh India main CPU chip with all its bypassing there lots of there's lots of ear stitching in there and going around here Oh off the expansion connector as well three point three bolts on there so three and Sodor be 3.3 volt IO on there and down to your main graphic chip down here a little fear action in there and put one in the middle because it looks sexy so there you have it that's pretty much the main board in a nutshell are very nicely designed very minimalist design and huge attention to detail are paid in terms of the shielding and you know EMI stuff I mean you know they've really gone to town they're absolutely phenomenal and of course all single board construction I mean you know the only sort of dodgy thing is you know your hand assemble connector up here but apart from that you know really clever systems engineering to go into that but of course they would have spent a lot of engineer hours on this let me tell you trying to perfect it and all the variations of it for the different markets as well by the way I forgot to take note of the rather unusual package on the RAM bus memory up here look there's only four pins on the top of here and there so all the i/o is along the bottom down here there you go you don't see much of that well I don't I can't recall seeing that anywhere today I could be wrong but geez yeah it's not common and I've powered this thing up and it's up much lower than its specified max or you know average I don't know what it is marked on the back there presumably because there's no cartridge plugged in and of course we're not running again but hey both the 12 volt and 3.3 volt rails are pulling something we'll just do some basic probing around here yes I've got my low impedance attachment on the therefore the ground so let's probe this crystal down here it says fourteen point seven megahertz so we should be able to don't even need to read the pin out so I can guess there we go fourteen point seven bang and the other one up here said that one says 17.7 hang on let's get another ground point and there we go seventeen point seven three four megahertz so those two crystals are working not a problem at all let's look at our five volt rail up here I mean this stuff is not supposed to be working but yet there it is being five volts where at one volt per division there so we're all working so the main clocks are going so let's have a look at the output to those and that lower chip from the fourteen point seven megahertz we are getting bang on fifty megahertz output on that sucker and the top one up there driven from the 17.7 megahertz crystal it's our clock going off to the D encode the encoder chip plus the main graphic process so that one is forty nine point six five seven now I can't see any memory bus action on the first chip I'm not sure if they're separate type memory interfaces or not but we get in really no activity there at all nothing doing so either you know presumably the thing just shuts down and does nothing when there's no cartridge installed or this thing is um yeah grossly faulty and we're getting nothing so I'm not sure what a normal system operation is supposed to be there but you know it wouldn't surprise me if the chip just shuts down and does absolutely nothing like the graphics chip does nothing until well in the main CPU would be running so you'd be sharing some of that presumably and well I you know yeah I don't know but it wouldn't surprise me if it just you know went into some sort of hibernation mode just waiting to plug a cartridge into there and the termination voltage which has its own that low dropout regulator down in here that's a measuring yet two and a half volts and I'm not seen anything between the two CPU and the graphics processor either so really yeah either this things are dead as a dodo or it's in some sort of a weight / hibernation mode for that cartridge but hold on to your hat folks we are getting some data on this video bus here which goes over to the d encoder looks like the same stuff on all the pins so yeah interesting but there is that certainly something happening there in terms of the video I mean that's a that's just the same thing going on at date you know twelve point four megahertz there's a quite a few pins there have exactly the same signal on it so I'm sorry to tell you that some as boring as the proverbial bat poo I don't see anything exciting there at all as happen here you know maybe get out my active probe and measure you know a couple hundred megahertz or something like that but no nothing doing there at all so I'm not sure what the deal is there I was told it was 40 so yeah who knows umm so thanks very much Dave for sending that in to mailbag slash teardown Tuesday and if you like the segment as always please give it a big thumbs up and the place to discuss it is the EEV blog forum where probably 150 or 200 people are hanging out right now just ah expressing their opinion answering helping questions fantastic place to be the forum anyway that it's a very interesting look inside a 1996 slash while this one 97 vintage Nintendo in 64 I hope that border teared of the eye of some people who have fond memories of that catch you next time you you

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 319,798

Rating: 4.8925409 out of 5

Keywords: nintendo 64, nus, teardown, game console, 90's, super nintendo, Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Computer), Video Game Console (Invention), Nintendo (Organization), games, cartridge, disassembly, how to, how to open, repair, mario, super mario, n64, open, security screw, pcb, hack, mod, console, retro, vintage

Id: ScicrgZwvg4

Length: 31min 7sec (1867 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 02 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/just_another_juan]

Can anyone recommend more channels like Dave's? I got Make and the Ben Heck show but I'd like to see other options.

[u/CalcProgrammer1]

I really enjoy watching Dave's videos, they're always entertaining and informative. I've already torn apart my ebay purchase N64 for cleaning but I'm sure I'll still watch this.