Chrizum on 02 November 2009
There were two things wrong with the N64 hardware.
1) It used cartridges instead of CDs.
CDs have much more data capacity, so primarily textures would have looked much better.
2) It lacked a dedicated sound chip.
Sound was done by the CPU instead of a dedicated sound chip. This means any game with good music or voice acting was putting a heavy load on the CPU, thus lowering framerates among other things.
If these two things would have been fixed, the N64 would have been close to the Dreamcast in power (if we include Expansion Pack that is), and that's no lie.
Imagine Pefect Dark with sharper textures at a constant 30FPS. That would have been possible!
