Zachary Levy

"The N64 shipped with the NEC VR4300: a single core, in-order execution, 93.75 MHz CPU. It was paired with the 'Reality Co-Processor' (RCP), running at 62.5 MHz, for acceleration of audio and graphics computations. It supported 4 MB of RAM (later expanded to 8 MB with the Expansion Pak). Game cartridges for the N64 were, at most, 64 MB. "By today’s standards, this is incomprehensibly underpowered. You, the reader, in your pocket—or perhaps in your hand, while you read this—likely have at least four out-of-order execution cores, running somewhere from 2 GHz to 4 GHz. That’s something like 20-40 times more cycles per second than the N64’s VR4300, spread across 2-4 more cores. Each core is vastly more capable of higher throughput in doing useful work, given their out-of-order execution, deeper pipelines, new caching layers, and numerous other hardware optimizations that I’m not qualified to even attempt to explain. This magical device in your pocket also has 8 GB of RAM—three orders of magnitude more than what the N64 offered. It also can have something like 32, 64, 128, 256, 1024 GB of cold storage—several thousands of times larger than the N64 cartridge size. "Needless to say, computing technology has progressed in countless ways since the 1996 release of the N64. But the belief in the constant of progress over time is a privilege unique to modern civilization, and this belief can blind to concrete examples of regress over time. "Despite the aforementioned mind-boggling computing hardware advancements, there remains enormous love for the N64, and other old computing devices. The Analogue 3D, an FPGA implementation of original N64 hardware, released in 2025. Similarly, the ModRetro M64 (another such implementation) released in 2026."