What was the N64 Expansion Pak actually used for?

[Music] March 1 1997 this is the launch date of the Nintendo 64 in Australia yes I'm aware that it launched in '96 in North America and Japan but back in those days I was a very poor college student and there was no way that I could afford the price to import a system from overseas but it didn't matter when the Nintendo 64 did launch in Australia it changed my life I fell in love with the hardware and it truly felt like the biggest generational leap in Hardware ever now of course many could argue the case here that the PlayStation 1 to PlayStation 2 or the Saturn to the Dreamcast was even more technologically impressive but for me personally going from the Super NES to the N64 was a massive generational leap and it truly transformed video games into a new dimension literally but there was always something about the N64 that bothered me this port labeled memory expansion taking the top off revealed deals what is known as a jumper pack do not remove jumper pack from control deck the sticker claimed but I always wondered what is the purpose of this memory expansion Port after all all my games at the time ran just fine without any expansion but as it turns out this would be the home for the Nintendo 64 expansion pack which simply adds an additional 4 MB of ram to the hardware bringing it up to a total of 8 mbes the expansion pack released in 1998 and it was originally meant for the ill- faded 64dd but Nintendo moved forward and released it for the Nintendo 64 to take advantage of cartridge games and while there is a moderate selection of games that do take advantage of the expansion almost every game in the Nintendo 64 Library simply doesn't require one and this along with the Sega satin back in 1995 was the very first time I can ever remember a game console ever making use of expanded memory now as someone that grew up with home computers in my houseold hold I was very familiar with what Ram expansions were coming from the Amiga 500 having an additional 512 Koby of memory added to the A500 back in the day opened up a ton of new games that I couldn't play without it what I loved about this was that when you loaded some games when you had the extra Ram it would display an image that the extra Ram was detected it truly made you feel like a power user but a ram expansion on a game console like the N64 what is even the purpose after all game consoles have a fixed Hardware spec and every developer needs to work within those conditions if the N64 has 4 megabytes on board then all games must run within those 4 megab of memory correct well not exactly as it turns out there was a grand total of two games that actually required the Nintendo 64 expansion pack Donkey Kong 64 and Majora's Mask these two games required the expansion pack and would not work without it a third game Perfect Dark did on the box advertised that the expansion pack was required however it could still run without one offering about 35% of the complete game and this was something that was advertised on the back of the box if you didn't have the expansion pack then you were out of luck if you did then you had access to the entire game Nintendo was very smart to not actually require the expansion pack in games immediately and it was something that they introduced with Donkey Kong 64 in other words they were far more forward thinking they waited almost a year before making the memory pack available this meant that if you wanted access to higher Fidelity Graphics faster frame rates and more content then you would be more inclined to purchase the expansion pack now let's talk about dk64 in some detail it's a 3D platform action adventure game which as Donkey Kong you explore an island and collect items to progress through mini games and puzzles now this game itself is very polarizing some people love dk64 many people hate it as the worst collectathon ever in video games but that is beside the point Nintendo themselves spent 22 million marketing dk64 as the big holiday game of 1999 and it was the very first game that not only required the expansion pack it even came bundled with the game itself so no one was left behind now let's address the elephant in the room exactly how does dk64 make use of this expansion pack if we look at the game on face value it's an impressive looking game no question but it's really not any more impressive than say conquer's Bad Fur Day another rare Nintendo 64 title that really pushed the hardware toward its limits which didn't use the expansion pack and there is a long-standing myth that the expansion pack was used in dk64 to address a memory leak which would end up crashing the game after a few hours of play so the solution then was just to bundle the 4M expansion pack with every single copy of dk64 effectively mitigating the issue itself now it is important to note here that that the term memory leak was never used by Rare themselves they called it a game breaking glitch or a bug now before we proceed and dive deeper into this topic I do think it's important to illustrate to you guys what a memory leak is with a real world example so let's go ahead and take a look at that right now now to best explain what a memory leak is in its truest form I've got this very very simple program here and basically when this runs it's going to go into a loop and it's going to run continuously until I break out of the program and what this program is doing is very simple it's allocating a piece of memory to store four bytes or the size of an integer and then it's assigning that integer to the value 15 and then printing that out to the screen the underlying root cause for this is that we're allocating a block of memory but we're never freeing it up and we keep allocating memory in a loop but it never gets freed and in this particular example only after a few seconds of running this program even though we're only allocating four bytes on a loop you can see that we're already exceeding exceeding about 880 megabytes of usage and over time after a few hours of usage this will be a lot higher we're into the gigabytes at that point and eventually we're going to start running out of system memory now remember the Nintendo 64 only has 4 megabytes so something as simple as this some oversight could really be catastrophic but I'm here to tell you that this memory leak expansion pack myth is simply not true and here's why deadlines in video games are a real thing trust me I know but I'm also familiar with the certification process or lot check as Nintendo calls it games are tested thoroughly including what is known as soak tests where the game is left running for many many hours to see what the behavior is including memory leakage Nintendo would have most certainly picked up on it and even with the Christmas deadline looming it's hard to believe that just by adding the memory pack expansion that this problem would simply be fixed first of all adding more memory wouldn't fix the issue at all it would only prolong it but let's play devil's advocate for a second and assume that this actually was the case since then in the world of YouTube there is simply no video evidence of the game crashing after prolonged use as well as this there is no patched drom that lets you play the game in 4 megabytes furthermore this would be something that dk64 speed Runners would have picked up on years ago and it simply doesn't exist despite the Nintendo 64's limitation and the fairly early onset of 3D technology it was one of the very first Nintendo 64 games that actually featured dynamic lights so when you walked into a new area there was a lot going on and you can see this pretty much early on from the beginning of the game itself and the most compelling thing here is that according to Simon kraic one of four Engineers who worked on dk64 the extra Ram was only ever used to take advantage of ongoing improvements in technology specifically more advanced vertex lighting and the final piece of this is that there is an ongoing reverse engineering effort for dk64 right now and it's very apparent that the memory map of the game featured almost the entire set of 8 mbes so the concept of a memory League restricting Donkey Kong 64s release without an expansion pack is simply false but outside of these two required games the expansion pack did a pretty decent job of enhancing games with over 60 titles supporting it ask any developer out there and they will tell you that having more RAM is always welcome it allows features and enhancements that were simply just not possible without and since Nintendo opened up the expansion pack support to many games that were in development developers would use the expansion pack in some pretty interesting ways the first and most common method was to increase resolutions but in many scenarios this would come at the expense of reduced frame rates this is because increasing the frame buffer needs more time to render a complete frame the Nintendo 64 supports a maximum resolution of 640x480 most games with high resolution support never actually hit this Mark take take for example turac 2 its internal resolution is running at 320x 240 but with the expansion pack it introduces a high-res 480x 360 mode the effect is a much cleaner game but once again at the expense of a frame rate and in some parts of the game it's quite noticeable FIFA 99 is another game that also supports a super high resolution mode and this is running at 640x480 and it does look very clean but look how much choppier the game playay is in this mode vigilante 8 is a game that's basically a ripoff of Twisted Metal and one game that I actually quite enjoyed back in the day it has a hidden 640x480 mode by typing in max resolution in the game's cheat code section once again the visuals are much sharper but the performance is significantly reduced but I don't think it's a fair thing to say that all games that use the expansion pack and high resolution modes will have frame rate issues there are definitely some outliers for example resident Evil 2 is one of the more fascinating games on the N64 that we have covered before but did you know the expansion pack increases resolutions from the standard 320x 240 all the way up to 640x480 with different resolutions that intentionally are set based on the number of enemies in the room this has the effect of really enhancing visuals and makes the expansion pack the very best way to experience Resident Evil 2 and I think this could be considered a very early onset of what we would consider Dynamic resolution switching which is really cool now of course with a modern capture device like the retrotink 4K that I'm using here to handle screen resolution switchings on the Fly while it does a pretty good job you'll still notice a slight pause and of course this message on the top right hand side that's telling us what the current resolution is this of course wasn't anything that the original development team was even thinking about when outputting the game on a CRT and there are no such issues there the other game that comes to mind that has a high resolution mode that doesn't affect frame rate is Indiana Jones and the infernal Machine by enabling high res mode it bumps resolution to 400x 440 it even unlocks a level 13 King Souls mine this resolution increase looks very clean and I do love how much better the game is and Factor five of course are the masses of the Nintendo 64 and if there were any frame rate drops here they are very well concealed because I personally haven't noticed any at all another interesting use case for the expansion pack is to keep screen resolutions as they are but instead increase texture quality and this approach not only can lead to improvements in visual quality but it can also improve frame rates Quake 2 is a very good example of this in the base mode the game looks like it's running at a standard res with very low resolution textures nice and blurry as we would expect but the frame rate is pretty good but then with the expansion pack you'll notice that the resolution hasn't changed at all however the texture detail has and not only this additional optimizations have been done to also improve frame rates Quake 2 on the N64 is probably one of the very best reasons to get a N64 expansion pack and it really does benefit from the additional memory another great example of increased Fidelity is7 The World is Not Enough you can really notice the difference in quality when switching between the standard and the high color mode with the expansion pack and abled another method to provide an enhanced experience with the memory pack was to Simply use the additional memory to add new functionality to existing games and one of the best examples that I can remember is Gauntlet Legends now this game is a pretty faithful conversion from the arcade but if you want to play four-player co-op it's only available with the expansion pack and that extra memory facilitates having four players on screen at once Hydro Thunder is another example of this the expansion pack is required for three and four player multiplayer otherwise without the expansion pack it can only be up to a two-player game and finally some games use the expansion pack in ways that really benefit the overall performance but in subtle ways and a great example of this are the acclaimed sports games such as Allstar baseball with the expansion pack loaded there is a lot of prefetching and pre-loading of data that's being loaded in and decompressed ahead of time and usually this was done when the title screen was being displayed now overall performance is improved because there is a lot of data that's already in memory which result in a better frame rate but this was something that was quite subtle now if you didn't have an expansion pack the game still looked and ran very very well but code and data was being swapped in and decompressed as needed so this definitely was a lesser overall experience and in conclusion the N64 expansion pack is a very interesting device and in many ways it's a pointless peripheral that really outside of the three games it didn't really make too much sense to have but there's definitely some compelling reasons why you would have needed one especially if you wanted the very best that the Nintendo 64 could offer was it a necessary device to have absolutely not but I'm very glad it exists and it really does show what interesting and creative things developers could do with an extra bit of ram but we are going to leave it here for today's episode guys thank you so much for watching let me know your favorite N64 game and if there was any benefit from the memory pack please let me know cuz I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this topic as well but thank you so much for watching guys we're going to leave it here don't forget to leave me a thumbs up and I'll catch you guys in the next episode bye for [Music] [Music] now

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 921,240

Keywords: nintendo 64, n64, expansion pak, n64 expansion pak, n64 ram pak, 4mb, 8mb, secrets of the n64, mvg, modern vintage gamer, ram expansion, memory expansion, nintendo, super mario 64, high res, turok 2, required, was it required, stop skeletons, weird nintendo, nintendo accessories, majoras mask, perfect dark, donkey kong, n64 games, expansion pak vs jumper pak, retro gaming, expansion pack, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Resident Evil 2, zelda music, dk64, donkey kong 64

Id: YI4lBxTpzB4

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 27 2024