Pemalite said:
Soundwave said:
- I mean consumer CD-drives were $100, but no way were massive corporations like Sony or even Nintendo paying $100/drive (this would 1/2 the entire price of the Playstation in 1996). I mean even as a consumer you would likely get a pretty sharp discount if for some reason you ordered 10 million CD drives even back then, lol. Nintendo should've used the delay of the N64 from 1995 to fall 1996 to add an optical drive. Even if they did something "Nintendo-ey" like use propietary mini-CDs in a protective caddy, that would've offered them a cheap format with 200+MB of storage ... would've resulted in a ton more happy 3rd party partners. |
I never asserted that Nintendo and Sony were paying $100 AUD a drive, hence why I stipulated "consumer".
The Nintendo 64 had other issues that held it back as well, like the 4kb texture size limitation which forced games like Mario 64 to use Gourad shading instead of textures.
CD Drives were an additional cost, they still are in current consoles, hence why discless consoles are cheaper.
Soundwave said:
- If the Switch successor launches at $399.99 ... that's plenty of overhead for a pretty nice chip (like say ... a Tegra 239). There's no chance this thing will be $299.99 even when the Switch OLED itself is $350 and selling just fine.
Even with inflation and economic slowdown ... the game industry seems to be doing just fine. The Switch is selling well for a system its age, you still really can't find PS5's on storeshelves even after a price *increase* (lol), and it sounds like the XBox is outselling the XBox One. People still want to be entertained. If Nintendo has a successor hardware ready, likely they won't be able to manufacture enough for demand anyway, so they can afford a higher price point. |
The purchasing power of a dollar world-wide is decreasing, so higher prices should be the expectation.
OLED panels are also getting cheaper, they are starting to filter downwards into lower-end devices finally.
Yeah, manufacturing a sufficient stockpile is going to be crucial to not have a repeat of Switch/Series X/Playstation 5 shortages again.
Soundwave said:
Sony and Philips didn't have a monopoly on CD ROM by the mid-1990s, there were tons of CD-ROM manufacturers at that point that they could have gone with, although I'm pretty sure they fulfilled their contractual obligation to Philips anyway. There was still Hitachi, Matsushita/Panasonic, Toshiba, NEC, JVC, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, that they could've gone with but I don't think Philips would've said no to supplying a CD drive either. I mean from Philips' POV a Super NES CD add-on released late in the system's product cycle realistically was going to sell what? Maybe 5 million units tops? The Sega CD sold 2.24 million life time. An order for N64 CD drives which every system would have to include could net them 40-50+ million orders, that sure beats an add-on, so I think even if Nintendo wanted to work with Philips, Philips would be smart enough to see an N64 CD was a far better deal for them than a SNES CD add-on (add-on's always being limited in user adoption). Nintendo simply bit way too hard on the CDs aren't suitable for games nonsense. Should have compromised on that but kept the cartridge slot and they could've had cartridge games, which would've allowed Mario 64 to be released no problem, but also benefitted from CD based games. Even cart + CD combo games would've been smart you could keep cart sizes at only 8-16MB and offload extra data like music to a 10 cent CD to save yourself from having to spend on 32/64MB carts. That would've saved Nintendo money that probably would've paid for the CD drive on its own many times over. |
Sony was a pretty big player in the CDROM component manufacturing... But I doubt they would have prevented any company from using their technology, otherwise the word "Anti-Trust" get's thrown around pretty hard.
Soundwave said:
Yeah but that's a different issue, their *chipset* for the Saturn was more of a 2D processor than a 3D one. The format really didn't hurt it though. I think there's no real point in ditching a cartridge slot, cartridge slots really don't cost that much, so when people position the debate as "cartridge vs CD!" it didn't really need to be that way at all. I mean even Nintendo by announcing the 64DD basically the same time as unveiling the N64 was basically conceding even at that point that cartridges alone weren't sufficient. They should've just swallowed their pride a bit at that point and just agreed to add in a CD drive. |
Cart slots are always cheaper than an optical or mechanical drive.
But it's the media where the costs become extremely one-sided where carts command a massive price premium over optical. |
The OLED display in the Switch OLED is so good honestly Nintendo should probably just re-use it for a Switch successor. It's honestly probably the first time with a Nintendo portable I've gone "wow, this screen is amazing" instead of "well this just good enough I guess". OLED display just makes colors pop so much more and blacks are inky black, which is perfect for Nintendo's games especially, and yeah this tech is just getting cheaper and cheaper because it's used in so many other devices these days. It's actually the one thing I noticed with Steam Deck is the lack of an OLED display is definitely noticeable.
Regarding CD-drives I mean by the mid-90s basically every PC being shipped had this kind of a CD drive, I wonder if most people even knew what company made their CD-drive, a lot of PCs just shipped with a "generic" brand less CD-ROM drive.
My CD drive in my PC (circa 1994) growing up I think was made by Creative. But there were so many CD-ROM manufacturers, even companies like Pioneer, Yamaha, etc.
My guess would be that Nintendo if they didn't want to work with Philips they would have probably turned to NEC or Panasonic (who they did work with on the GameCube). NEC had a history with Nintendo as early gen Famicom/NES games were coded on NEC computers and NEC had made CD drives for game systems before (PC Engine/Turbo Grafx 16). Nintendo even considered buying the PC Engine/Turbo Grafx 16 chip I believe to be the NES successor. But even more than that the N64's 64-bit CPU was the NEC VR4300. So NEC was already invested in the N64, I'm sure they would've been happy to make a CD drive for it if Nintendo asked.
