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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

In HCI terms, the Gamecube didn't do much. But it was Nintendo's single largest leap in architecture and hardware power—it sticks out above their console "power curve" trend-line quite strikingly.

The Wii was basically just a higher-clocked (~2x CPU and GPU) Gamecube—much more like the XBO S or the PS4 Pro are for this generation, than like the architectural reinventions Nintendo usually gets up to. The fact that it seemed like a whole new console with new capabilities for games, is more than anything a statement of how much untapped potential there still was in the Gamecube's architecture at the end of its life, that Wii developers went on to find.

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Dolphin EMU really highlights how strong and under-appreciated so many of the GameCube gen games are: Viewtiful Joe, F-Zero X, Luigi's Mansion, Mario Sunshine, Pikmin, Wind Waker, and especially the Metroid Prime series are outgrageously good games.

Hard to think of any real bombs in that entire library TBH.

Oh man, games like F-Zero GX, you just don't get this stuff on Sony or Microsoft consoles. Also Metroid Prime, Super Smash Bros Melee! Stuff of legends. 4 player support on the same couch? Damn. Gamecube might have been the best console from Nintendo in my view.

Yes F-Zero GX after coffee was fun. So so fast.

I have sold my Gamecube but hold the Wind Waker in my heart as a game I could play and play. I simply loved sailing around in that little boat in a happy cartoon land. It's the one game my wife would happily watch me play for hours on end.

Wario World was also very good but I never completed it - kept getting stuck on the magical mirror level

I used to live about ~20 minutes out of town by bike (Netherlands). My friends used to say that the biggest problem with coming by to play F-Zero is that the bike ride home always felt so ridiculously slow afterwards.

Dolphin is a very good emulator that can absolutely handle F-Zero. No need to hold the game in your heart, just play it on your PC!

F-Zero GX I still play quite often (agonisingly badly, but at the moment I'm still a bit better at it than my kids are). I'd love to see another F-Zero.

Also of course the two excellent Zelda games. What a fab console.

I never owned any console until the GameCube. Nintendo converted me over from PC gaming with the quality of the games and the system itself. Since then I've owned every Nintendo system.

I also bought a PS3, but more as a DVD/BluRay player. Other than Little Big Planet and Skyrim I never liked any of the other games for it.

>you just don't get this stuff on Sony or Microsoft consoles.

Well, now you don't really get it on Nintendo consoles either. Out of the series you named only one has had a remotely recent installment, and the metroid IP had only been used for taking down fan projects since Other M. That's why, as of now at least, there's no way I'm buying one of these. I can play all the best games from Nintendo's library in Dolphin, on the same PC I run Skyrim on. I don't really see how that game is still supposed to be a selling point.

> on the same PC I run Skyrim on. I don't really see how that game is still supposed to be a selling point.

It seems embarrassing for Nintendo:

"We finally have the game you've been playing on every other console for literally 6 years!"

But it's a huge boost for Bethesda:

"Skyrim's so goddamned popular that Nintendo approached us about putting it on their new console 6 years after it came out!"

Donkey Kong Jungle Beat played on the plastic bongo controller (with handclap sensor!) is definitely in my top 5 games ever.

(It's playable on the older Wii models with gamecube ports if anyone is intrigued by the description)

>Super Smash Bros Melee

I'd love to be able to get a few people over and just bust out the SSB for a few hours - so many great memories from uni. A seconnd hand GC + the game is ridic expensive though so my options are pretty much limited to homebrew

The GameCube was the only Nintendo console I've never owned.

Sure, Melee was fun, but I played all the time at my friends' apartments. I didn't need to play it at home: multiplayer was where the fun was at. Usually after a class (I was in college during the GameCube's heyday), a classmate and I would go over to his apartment and play Melee for a few hours.

I might have bought a GameCube if it had a decent Mario platformer (and I felt burned by the N64 too... Super Mario 64 was a huge disappointment to me... the Galaxy games were the first 3D platformers I could stand, and I didn't really get the 3D platformer I wanted until 3D World).

For some real speed the Extreme-G series always made me happy, the audio ducks when you break the sound barrier, I love that.

Difficult control and the "battle mode" multiplayer is garbage, also lacks the character of F-Zero series but a very pretty and enjoyable game with lots of variety in the tracks.

I agree with your point but the Xbox One S and PS4 Pro are nothing alike. The equivalent of the Xbox One S is the PS4 Slim. It's mainly just a shrunken Xbox One. The slight GPU frequency increase is nothing to write home about and certainly not in the same league as the PS4 Pro.

Wouldn't the biggest leap in power be the N64?

I would say it was the original Famicom or NES, which came hot on the heels of Nintendo's first hit electronic games, Game & Watch: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_%26_Watch

The NES was a phenomenal breakthrough, a paradigm shift.

Which is not to discredit Game & Watch, which brought Nintendo forward from an era of making playing cards. I had several clones as a kid.

Well, yeah but that's handheld vs console, etc. Then we'd get into even sillier comparisons of nintendo card games vs mechanical games vs electronic games. In the console space, SNES->N64 seems like the bigger jump qualitative jump to me. You can do 3d, vs you can't.

The SNES lasted a while in the market, and—almost uniquely among consoles—it ramped up in power over its lifetime by putting coprocessors like the SuperFX into game carts. By the end of its lifetime, the "system" of the SNES + a cart like Starfox, was much closer to the N64 than the base SNES, making the N64 much less of a shift than it seemed.

Interestingly, if you think of the PSX as descending from the SNES architecturally, it's nearly identical to the end-state of "SNES + SuperFX GSU-1", but with the one added feature of DMA-streamed block IO from the CD device. (Thus why the FF7 demo on the N64 used polygonal backgrounds, while on the PSX you get pre-rendered backgrounds. Each version plays to its console's strength. Makes you wonder what would have been possible in an alternate world where the N64 had a CD drive as well as its better polygon-pushing abilities.)

This also means that the PSX->PS2 likely represents the largest single-generation leap in power of any console: it was a catch-up from "basically a SNES" to modern-for-the-time hardware, representing a literal 10x jump in CPU and GPU power.

Maybe 'closer' but still 'ridiculously far'. You weren't going to coprocessor your way to a Mario 64.

I wouldn't call that 'ridiculously far'—it's "only" a 3x difference ;) The SuperFX GSU-1 clocked at 21MHz; the N64's RCP is 62.5MHz. (There's also an order-of-magnitude CPU power differential, but Mario 64 didn't use the CPU for much anyway.)

Now, given that the SuperFX's lifetime was short and its capabilities were likely never fully explored/exploited in that lifetime; and given that the SNES's on-cart coprocessors could completely override the console processor and just bang bits onto the video-output lines themselves (like the Super Gameboy does!); and given that the only thing stopping devs from sticking even more powerful chips into carts was cost (and even then, some producers just didn't care, and stuck ridiculous ARM7 cores into games like Megaman X3 for no useful reason at all...), I really do believe you would have seen something very much like Mario 64 for the SNES if it had lived just one more year.

(Heck, I bet that we know enough about the hardware today that someone from the demoscene could pull off a Mario-64-alike on a cycle-accurate SNES (with SuperFX) emulator. That'd be a fun competition.)

Right, you added a bunch of interesting details (thanks!) to your post after I glibly replied but I'm still not entirely convinced the SuperFX carts really count. It's a bit like saying your Apple ][ was just like a Mac because you could shove a 68020 card into it.

The SNES was a 3.5 MHz 16 bitter. The n64 was a 3d-capable machine with a 100ish MHz R4k, the RCP, an analog controller, etc, in the box. The advance just seems enormous (matching similar advances in personal computers in the same timeframe). If I'm understanding you right, you're making a case the advance was maybe not as discontinuous. But the scale of it still seems qualitatively greater than any of the subsequent ones, to me.

>" The SuperFX GSU-1 clocked at 21MHz; the N64's RCP is 62.5MHz."

You can't compare clock speeds in that way and get an accurate picture on performance. If you could, then a 3.8GHz Pentium 4 would be faster than a 2.8 GHz Kaby Lake Core i7.

To give a better (but still not completely accurate) idea of how far apart the SNES and N64 were in power, look at the difference in MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second) in just their CPUs:

SNES CPU (Ricoh 5A22): 1.5 MIPS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricoh_5A22

N64 CPU (NEC VR4300): 125 MIPS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_technical_specific...

Exactly. OP's misinformation is making my head hurt. If you were alive at the time instead of playing emulators on your PC now, you'd have no doubt the N64 was a huge leap.

And how could it not be? The two systems were released 6 years apart (if you count SNES in Japan 1990), back when Moore's law was in full effect.

You're stretching it. The N64 was a beast even quite some time after introduction. I understand the point about SNES 3D ability blurring the line for the average consumer. But 1 minute into play and you'd understand the massive leap. I remember when Zelda 64 was released, a friend got all the latest PSX games (moto racer N, Tomb Raider 3, whatever).

We played Zelda a few minutes, but then switched to the PSX. We tried all games in a row less than 5 minutes each, they were disgusting in comparison. And these were mature sequels not launch lineup. When Zelda 64 was on screen we realized how much better everything was on the N64.

Comparing the N64 and PSX is painful on many levels, I've always found the polygon tearing effect on the PSX extremely distracting and off-putting visually. (This artifact is an apparent result a lack of floating point support[0])

However the massive size of disc based PSX games vs N64 carts yielded visual variety that we just didn't get on the N64.

Not to mention the music, although N64 Tetrisphere's amazing music by Neil Voss was actually implemented as an interpreted mod track composed in FastTracker complete with samples. Such a good game.

[0]: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tric...

It's not tearing, it's called affine swim, and on PC is a tell tale sign of a software renderer. Overall the N64 was ok (I had one). The PS2 was so much better though, there was just a way better variety of good games. N64 kind of sucked if you didn't want to play Goldeneye, Zelda or Super Mario 64 clones.

Also, Tetrisphere! There is a game I had forgotten about. It was so good!

> It's not tearing, it's called affine swim, and on PC is a tell tale sign of a software renderer.

I've never hear the term "affine swim" before. Is it an artifact in rasterization (leaving gaps between triangles) or texturing (the term "affine" suggests that)?

For the rasterization, I've heard the term "watertight rasterization" (or airtight?) being used for a gapless rasterizer. It's not necessarily a software vs. hardware render issue, you can implement a watertight software rasterizer (of course) but I guess in the 1990s this was a performance vs. fidelity issue. And even with early 3d accelerators, the vertex processing was still done in the CPU.

Unfortunately I am not an expert but the Wikipedia article has an explanation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_mapping#Affine_textu...

Affine swim refers to the unique results this kind of texturing results in (it looks like textures are swimming)

Yeah there was no floating point for a while on consoles. I remember spending a week or two making a renderer that subdivided geometry so the textures would tear less. It was more expensive so had to be done based on view distance.

Some of the later SNES games were even rumored to be N64 ones for a while, like Killer Instinct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_Instinct

You're absolutely wrong. The PS1 was nothing like an SNES + SuperFX chip spec wise.

PS1 has nothing in common hardware wise with the "Nintendo Playstation" add-on other than in name alone.

Yeah I'm curious to hear a defense of the 'PSX, architectural successor of the SNES' argument myself.

He is completely wrong and must be confusing PS1 with the unreleased add-on, which would make more sense. The Nintendo Playstation is not much more than an SNES with a CD-ROM drive and some extra memory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-CyGXMabg

He is probably too young to have grown up with a PS1. I believe reading at the time that Sony poured close to $1bn into developing the PS1 hardware. This made sense-- the Sony brand then was what Apple is now, and this was their first full foray into the games industry.

If you compare Star Fox running at 15fps on a SuperFX chip w/ untextured polys to Gran Turismo 2 running at 30fps, you will see why OP is spewing clueless garbage. The PS1 was a monster for its time. It blew away the hardware of Saturn and 3DO, when it came to 3D at least. 3D acceleration was new, and even PC gamers were jealous of what the PS1 had to offer at launch. And arguably it was not even dethroned by the N64 a year later.

Get off my lawn.

I think the argument is still worth hearing, even if it's off your lawn. I mean, I also think it can't possibly be right but it can probably be sorted out without getting into a 'you were too young' pee-fest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_technical_specific...

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~dherring/cgt141/project1/comparis...

http://www.giantbomb.com/super-fx-chip/3015-7544/

Take a look for yourself. They are nothing at all alike.

According to Square programmers about the power of PSX vs N64, (source from the recent excellent article about Final Fantasy 7: http://www.polygon.com/a/final-fantasy-7)

"I kind of had a suspicion that things weren’t going too well for the 64 at that point, because … one of my responsibilities … was to write performance applications that compared how well the 64 fared against the prototype [PlayStation]. And we’d be running parallel comparisons between the [PlayStation] where you’d have a bunch of 2D sprites bouncing off the screen and see how many polygons you could get within a 60th of a second. And even without any kind of texturing or any kind of lighting, it was less than 50% of what you would be able to get out of the [PlayStation]. Of course, the drawback of the [PlayStation] is it didn’t really have a z-buffer, so you’d have these overlapping polygons that you’d have to work around so that you wouldn’t get the shimmering [look]. But on the other hand, there was no way you’d be able to get anything close to what FF7 was doing [on PlayStation] on the 64 at that time."

So, at least according to the square programmers the PSX was more powerful when it came to raw polygon processing power. Of course N64 was doing much more with it's hardware, and also having a Z-buffer for real depth information, so these numbers are not really directly comparable.

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