Iwata: Nintendo 64 didn't work at all

[jarrod]

Chrizum said:
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!

The Rambus RDRAM was really slow too, with lots of access latency and misfires.   A redesigned N64 with faster RAM, a CD-ROM and a dedicated sound chip (hell, even sticking the SNES chip in there again) would've been a beast for the time.  And probably still profitable at $299.

But no, it wouldn't have come close to Dreamcast, which had it's own unfortunate design decisions (too little VRAM, too slow a CPU, GD-ROM over DVD, etc).