The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the sequel to Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and it’s scheduled to hit the Switch on May 12, 2023. One gamer, who goes by ‘Jackarte’, was a big fan of the N64 back in the late 90s and created a trailer showing what this sequel might look like on the last major home console to use cartridges.
When it was first released back in 1996, the N64 was ahead of its team, powered by a 64-bit NEC VR4300 CPU with a clock rate of 93.75 MHz and a performance of 125 MIPS. It had power similar to Intel’s Pentium processors found in desktop computers, and aside from its narrower 32-bit system bus, the VR4300 retained the computational abilities of the more powerful 64-bit MIPS R4300i.
Nintendo Switch (OLED model) with White Joy-Con
- Vivid 7” OLED screen
- Local co-op, online, and local wireless multiplayer
- 64 GB internal storage (a portion of which is reserved for use by the system)
The N64 was one of the first consoles to integrate a unified memory subsystem rather than having separate banks of memory for CPU, audio, and video operations. It featured 4 megabytes of Rambus RDRAM, expandable to 8 MB with the Expansion Pak. This technology was quite new at the time and offered Nintendo a way to provide a large amount of bandwidth for a relatively low cost. NEC’s Reality Coprocessor or the CPU processed audio and outputted it to a DAC with up to 48.0 kHz sample rate.
