I still fail to see the logic of those mini discs as a measure to prevent "piracy" when the Gamecube is now one of the easiest systems to emulate now.

Really well now too with Dolphin and all that.

square soft and many other developers left nintendo cause of cartridges, yes, it would have been the dominating console i think. ocarina of time would also be a lot bigger/prettier....cause ocarina of time was at first a huge game based on the disk drive addon for n64. they had to cut a lot ideas and it was still thiiiiiiiiis good.

i dont think it would have made much a difference. nintendo had a really bad relationship with third parties back then and i think they would have made games for sony either way

From a game-play point of view, Nintendo made the right decision to go with cartridges in the 5th gen.

Back then, discs were unreliable and the loading times were atrocious. Many PS1 games for me were ruined (both figuratively and literally) because of it. It made the N64 a much more reliable system over the PS1. Didn't have a Saturn but I guess it could compare to PS1. The N64 also didn't have the hassle of memory cards for the most part. Yes, you had the controller-pack which certain games needed, but the big games all had memory within the cartridge. N64 games were just easier to pick up and play and they are in a way better state today than my PS1 games are.

From a business point of view though, they should've went with CD's.

Because of the ease of programming, the amount of data capable of being held on a disc as well as the very low costs would've kept a lot of key third parties in Nintendo's fold. I'm not saying N64 would've won the generation over the PlayStation, but it would've been a lot closer if developers like Square still supported Nintendo. Also, the games being a little cheaper at retail were they on discs would've also made things more competitive, most N64 games back then were more expensive than a lot of games today!

Going further back though, they shouldn't have bullied Sony during the development of the SNES-CD and should have went for this deal in the first place. They created their own worst enemy.

That would've been a huge thing for Nintendo. An Ocarina of Time with a disc's storage capacity, and Final Fantasy 7 on a more powerful console? Would've been much tougher for Sony to contend with.

AFAIK, there were other problems the devs had with the system (i.e. slow memory + not-enough, the rather odd controller), but the lack of discs was by far the biggest complaint.

It's not like the N64 lost ALL developers because of the cartridge format. The reality is Nintendo had lost almost all third-party support over a year before the N64 released in Japan, because Sony opened their arms to the developers and made the difference clear as heaven from hell. After they were lured away by Sony, there wasn't much Nintendo could do, the cartridge format was just the nail in the coffin. It's not like the N64 had any support at the start and then it was abandoned (like Wii, Wii U) , they NEVER had any support to start with.

It would have made all the difference. Better 3rd party support, more space, easy to program, etc.

Massive difference. They opened the door for Sony by choosing cartridge. Final fantasy, resident evil, metal gear, and possibly tomb raider would have come to the 64. Cartridges vs CD were deciding factors for developers back then because of the expense and limitations of cartridges, CD's were a no brainer to develop games on. Ps1 sold so well on the strength of 3rd party support. Choosing cartridge over CD was the beginning of the end for nintendos strong 3rd support.

It would have definitely made a huge difference, Nintendo could have potentially won that gen(and the following gen) had they gone with cd's for the N64.

It would not have made a difference if it had been a addon. But if the N64 had shipped with a CD-Rom instead of a cartridge slot it would have made a big difference. The N64 would have still had a texture size bottleneck, but the CD format would have allowed for more variety in those textures.

Resident Evil 64 uses a 512mb cartridge. It looks and sounds pretty damn good with all the cutscenes from a two disc Playstation game. That's just an example of what an N64 game can do if it isn't as constrained by data limits.