that pack added 4MB extra RAM, OOT and Majora’s Mask are like night and day thanks to it.
The N64 had mere kilobytes of texture cache, AFAIK the solution was to stream textures, but it took awhile for developers to figure that out
The N64 had mere kilobytes of texture cache, AFAIK the solution was to stream textures, but it took awhile for developers to figure that out
The streaming helped it a lot but I think the cost of larger carts was a big drag on what developers could do. It is one thing to stream textures but if you cannot afford the cart size in the first place it becomes merely academic.
In contrast, the N64 had a 4 kB texture RAM. That's it, all your textures for the current mesh had to fit in just 4 kB. If you wanted bigger textures, you had to come up with all sort of programming tricks.