N64

[IHateMyJob2004]

I want to grab one of these. What should I do to make sure that I get a solid controller that doesn't have a borked analog stick? Can those analog sticks be repaired? Did anyone back in the day make a better stick?

Looking to get an N64 w/ 2+ sticks and Super Mario and Wave Race.

 

[Atomic Playboy]

Your best bet for controllers is someone locally; the only way you'll be certain the stick is still good is an in-person test. Unfortunately, N64 controllers have a pretty high rate of analog stick failure, especially at this point in their life. Unless you have confidence you're dealing with an honest person online, you're going to want to test it out yourself. There might be used game shops in your area that offer hardware, so those would be a good place to start (obviously ask to test the merchandise first). The console and games will be easier (and possibly cheaper) to source online without too much worry about getting a broken product. But the controllers... yeah, those are real hit or miss.

 

[mmntech]

You can still purchase new third party N64 controllers online.
http://www.lukiegames.com/NEW-Nintendo-64-Lookalike-Gray-Controller.html

 

[IHateMyJob2004]

How come there is no market for replacement parts?

 

[Sabrewings]

You can still purchase new third party N64 controllers online.
http://www.lukiegames.com/NEW-Nintendo-64-Lookalike-Gray-Controller.html

Can't speak for all aftermarkets, but my best N64 controller was an aftermarket. The stick was a bit longer and had a concave top instead of convex. I found it offered much finer control.

How come there is no market for replacement parts?

http://smile.amazon.com/N64-Replace...id=1443109869&sr=1-35&keywords=n64+controller

 

[IHateMyJob2004]

Can't speak for all aftermarkets, but my best N64 controller was an aftermarket. The stick was a bit longer and had a concave top instead of convex. I found it offered much finer control.



http://smile.amazon.com/N64-Replace...id=1443109869&sr=1-35&keywords=n64+controller

With the replacement part, it seems like it is hard to go wrong with any controller. Probably best to buy a crappy one and fix it up.

 

[Sonikku]

Nintendo usually does a pretty good job with resiliency. One of their rare flubs.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Also in terms of the console itself, you should really look for getting one of the early dark grey/black models since these can be easily upgraded to output RGB with a simple RGB amp and a few soldered wires to the multi-out. This will give you the best picture quality you can get out of the system (especially to modern TV's when using a scaler like mini-framemeister).

Personally I found that the N64 console is the one that really didn't age as gracefully game wise as earlier and later consoles. Don't get me wrong, there are several good games for it, including some of my all-time favorites. But the 3D textures are just horrendous when you look at it now...

It is also possible to repair the analog stick. Once you take apart the stick housing, clean out all the plastic debris (cause from the rubbing together of the two different types of plastic in the housing in which one was harder than the other). You then need to get some 2 part epoxy and drill a small hole into the bottom center of the housing (there is a dimple there). This new hole will let you put the epoxy in from the top and will cause some of it to seep into the hole creating a concave surface (just like the bowl had originally, and the hole will let you get something like a jeweller's screw driver to pop out the epoxy if you need to ever redo the treatment). Sand the dried epoxy down a bit if it is too thick, and then put in a nice plastic safe lubricant into the housing (which was not ever used originally and part of the reason why the plastic wore away with movement over time), and close it all back up. Just be sure to not get any lubricant into the small holes on the 2 black plastic pieces as those holes are read by an optical reader to determine the position of the stick.

A safe lube I think is Molykote 44 Light is what you want to use.

 

[ghost recon88]

Also in terms of the console itself, you should really look for getting one of the early dark grey/black models since these can be easily upgraded to output RGB with a simple RGB amp and a few soldered wires to the multi-out. This will give you the best picture quality you can get out of the system (especially to modern TV's when using a scaler like mini-framemeister).

Personally I found that the N64 console is the one that really didn't age as gracefully game wise as earlier and later consoles. Don't get me wrong, there are several good games for it, including some of my all-time favorites. But the 3D textures are just horrendous when you look at it now...

Skip on the framemeister, you're gonna want to opt straight for http://ultrahdmi.retroactive.be/

 

[mmntech]

Personally I found that the N64 console is the one that really didn't age as gracefully game wise as earlier and later consoles. Don't get me wrong, there are several good games for it, including some of my all-time favorites. But the 3D textures are just horrendous when you look at it now...

I wonder what the N64 would have been like if Nintendo had just used CDs instead of those damn cartridges. That was a huge bottleneck for the system.

A lot of 3D games from that generation didn't age that well though. A lot of PlayStation games were downright ugly. Let's not even speak of the horror show that was the Saturn.

 

[Sabrewings]

I wonder what the N64 would have been like if Nintendo had just used CDs instead of those damn cartridges. That was a huge bottleneck for the system.

A lot of 3D games from that generation didn't age that well though. A lot of PlayStation games were downright ugly. Let's not even speak of the horror show that was the Saturn.

That wouldn't have solved the texture problem. It wasn't a cartridge storage issue since they could increase that at will when they liked. I remember the OoT cartridge being physically heavier than my others.

The texture problem was that it only had 4KB of texture memory from which it could reference up to 8 textures at a time. Unfortunately, if they used texture lookup tables, this memory dropped to 2KB. :|

This was the major limitation of the system. Various emulation simulations have shown that if the system were given a larger texture memory games could've looked much more rich without increasing polygon count. In hind sight, I can't believe they crippled themselves in such a way. I loved my N64, but I get kinda mad at Nintendo for its implementation. Too many good memories, though. Mario Kart 64, DK64, Zelda OoT, Smash Brothers, Star Fox, Goldeneye, etc.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Yeah, Goldeneye was awesome with friends. I must have spent 200 hours on that game freshman year of college playing multiplayer in my dorm.

 

[Sonikku]

I wonder what the N64 would have been like if Nintendo had just used CDs instead of those damn cartridges. That was a huge bottleneck for the system.

A lot of 3D games from that generation didn't age that well though. A lot of PlayStation games were downright ugly. Let's not even speak of the horror show that was the Saturn.

Had they gone the CD route, FF7 and beyond may have been on a Nintendo system. Just imagine how much of a game change that would have been. Sony securing Square was a big coup in making their Playstation a huge success. As for the Saturn, it's underrated. Developers thought the idea of a gaming console with more than one core was insane at the time and wouldn't take advantage of it. (Just imagine them try to make a game for one core today) Judging by early Shenmue footage, the system had hardly begun to see its potential tapped.

 

[Ichinisan]

Earlier this year, I sold brand new / unused original N64 controllers on eBay for obscene prices. I still have at least 2 more controllers to sell. I didn't think these particular ones were rare, but apparently it's super valuable to have them sealed/new. Someone told me I'd get over $500 for the orange Funtastic controller.

 

[Ichinisan]

I can't trust replacement joystick units. Third party controllers always had a different range of motion that affected gameplay.

In Blast Corps, controllers that allowed over-steering would cause the walker robots and your little guy on foot to do the backward moonwalk. In Mario Kart 64, it resulted in far more random spin-outs while driving around -- without getting bumped by anything that would cause a spin-out. All emulators get the range of motion wrong unless you have a classic N64 Adaptoid (on Win32 with the optional driver installed) and use an emulator with specific support for the Adaptoid driver's direct-access API. I have the oversteering problem even with Nintendo's Virtual Console version of Mario Kart 64.

 

[Ichinisan]

I play my N64 with S-Video on a CRT. You really don't want these old games to look much clearer than that. The scanlines help to mask the poor resolution. While the quality is still far more clear than RF/composite, it's somewhat more authentic to the way these games looked in the past than RGB (color range, etc). Also, no modification required (except the mini SNES didn't support S-video for some reason).

The SNES/N64/Gamecube S-video cables I bought from a local retro game store were seriously defective. I tried 3 or 4 of them and all had some strange interference pattern on the screen. I ended-up making my own S-video cable by extracting and re-positioning pins from a Nintendo composite AV cable. Then I bought more S-video cables on eBay and those were fine.

 

[CZroe]

Also in terms of the console itself, you should really look for getting one of the early dark grey/black models since these can be easily upgraded to output RGB with a simple RGB amp and a few soldered wires to the multi-out. This will give you the best picture quality you can get out of the system (especially to modern TV's when using a scaler like mini-framemeister).

Personally I found that the N64 console is the one that really didn't age as gracefully game wise as earlier and later consoles. Don't get me wrong, there are several good games for it, including some of my all-time favorites. But the 3D textures are just horrendous when you look at it now...

It is also possible to repair the analog stick. Once you take apart the stick housing, clean out all the plastic debris (cause from the rubbing together of the two different types of plastic in the housing in which one was harder than the other). You then need to get some 2 part epoxy and drill a small hole into the bottom center of the housing (there is a dimple there). This new hole will let you put the epoxy in from the top and will cause some of it to seep into the hole creating a concave surface (just like the bowl had originally, and the hole will let you get something like a jeweller's screw driver to pop out the epoxy if you need to ever redo the treatment). Sand the dried epoxy down a bit if it is too thick, and then put in a nice plastic safe lubricant into the housing (which was not ever used originally and part of the reason why the plastic wore away with movement over time), and close it all back up. Just be sure to not get any lubricant into the small holes on the 2 black plastic pieces as those holes are read by an optical reader to determine the position of the stick.

A safe lube I think is Molykote 44 Light is what you want to use.

I have two NS1 N64 consoles and at least a couple NS2 and later units, but I would suggest a Funtastic console for the superior Composite and S-Video output. Here are the reasons:
1) Hardly anyone has a good RGB monitor and they are increasingly rare. Most would have to get a tiny PSone LCD or one of those tiny RGB PVMs.
2) S-Video is already really good and Funtastic consoles have demonstrably better video output to start with.
3) You can now add RGB to a Funtastic console for unquestionably superior video quality to the old models.

That wouldn't have solved the texture problem. It wasn't a cartridge storage issue since they could increase that at will when they liked. I remember the OoT cartridge being physically heavier than my others.

The texture problem was that it only had 4KB of texture memory from which it could reference up to 8 textures at a time. Unfortunately, if they used texture lookup tables, this memory dropped to 2KB. :|

This was the major limitation of the system. Various emulation simulations have shown that if the system were given a larger texture memory games could've looked much more rich without increasing polygon count. In hind sight, I can't believe they crippled themselves in such a way. I loved my N64, but I get kinda mad at Nintendo for its implementation. Too many good memories, though. Mario Kart 64, DK64, Zelda OoT, Smash Brothers, Star Fox, Goldeneye, etc.

I've seen some very technical explanations about how Rareware and Factor 5 were able to get around that limitation in later games. It really was a limitation of the ROM capacity because that is why most devs never bothered. Why find a work around when all it meant was less room for the game or a larger/more expensive ROM with less profit?

With the N64's superior filtered textures AND much larger storage these techniques would have put the PSX to shame (filtering only looked bad because the textures were low-res to begin with).

 

[IHateMyJob2004]

Yeah, Goldeneye was awesome with friends. I must have spent 200 hours on that game freshman year of college playing multiplayer in my dorm.

We spent 200 hours a different way. Beating the game on the hardest difficulty setting.

 

[futurefields]

Personally I found that the N64 console is the one that really didn't age as gracefully game wise as earlier and later consoles. Don't get me wrong, there are several good games for it, including some of my all-time favorites. But the 3D textures are just horrendous when you look at it now...

And it's the most RPG-deprived system they released.

 

[CZroe]

We spent 200 hours a different way. Beating the game on the hardest difficulty setting.

Done and done fast enough to unlock every cheat and done again on the Japanese version.