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N64 had several 2D games, it just wasn't common. Yoshi's Story is prob best example. 2D platformer by Nintendo with gorgeous graphics. However, it was a lacklu

N64 had several 2D games, it just wasn't common. Yoshi's Story is prob best example. 2D platformer by Nintendo with gorgeous graphics. However, it was a lackluster, forgettable game. Still it proves the 64 was more than capable of exceeding 2D experiences from SNES. Other examples are StarCraft 64, Bust-a-Move 2, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, SimCity 2000, Killer Instinct Gold (character models 2D), Magical Tetris Challenge, Rampage 2, Ogre Battle 64, MK Mythologies: Sub Zero, Clay Fighter 63 1/2 (2D character models), South Park: Chef's Love Shack, Mischief Makers, etc etc It was more than capable of exceeding SNES quality graphics on every metric. The RDP on the N64 already had to render 2D rasters that were pre-transformed from 3D projections by the signal processor chip. Remove that 3D transformation step and allocate some RAM for buffer and you had a perfectly capable 2D platform.

error503 3y ago
There's no question it was possible, but the previous generation consoles provided powerful hardware sprite/tile-based engines with layers, smooth parallax scrolling, '2.5D' transformations and more. N64 has none of that, and as far as I know the SDK didn't include anything like a software 2D engine either. If you wanted to make a 2D game, you'd have to implement your own 2D rendering pipeline more or less from scratch. I also think the N64's relatively low memory bandwidth and low amount of RAM would have been an issue to get past for a software compositor. So yeah, it does provide access to the framebuffer, and has a reasonably capable CPU - more or less like PCs of the time did, so of course it's a 'perfectly capable 2D platform' but in this era I don't think we were quite at the point where brute-forcing the graphics pipeline in software was 'easy', and the 2D hardware capabilities were... let's say 'not exploited' by Nintendo's SDK. It wasn't preventing anyone from producing 2D games, obviously good games could be made, it was just definitely not optimized for that, and that just put more pressure towards 3D, that already had a lot of cultural pressure towards it. If the culture was there, I'm sure developers would have hacked away at it and developed it into a strong 2D platform, but without that it was a barrier.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  A 2D rendering pipeline is trivial. There are numerous hobbysist 2D rendering frameworks for every computer architecture in the past 40 years. It was far more difficult to program N64 in 3D than in 2D. The CPU was more than capable to exceed SNES in every dimension. It was not hard at all. 3D already requires 2D rendering.

error503 3y ago

There's no question it was possible, but the previous generation consoles provided powerful hardware sprite/tile-based engines with layers, smooth parallax scrolling, '2.5D' transformations and more. N64 has none of that, and as far as I know the SDK didn't include anything like a software 2D engine either. If you wanted to make a 2D game, you'd have to implement your own 2D rendering pipeline more or less from scratch. I also think the N64's relatively low memory bandwidth and low amount of RAM would have been an issue to get past for a software compositor. So yeah, it does provide access to the framebuffer, and has a reasonably capable CPU - more or less like PCs of the time did, so of course it's a 'perfectly capable 2D platform' but in this era I don't think we were quite at the point where brute-forcing the graphics pipeline in software was 'easy', and the 2D hardware capabilities were... let's say 'not exploited' by Nintendo's SDK. It wasn't preventing anyone from producing 2D games, obviously good games could be made, it was just definitely not optimized for that, and that just put more pressure towards 3D, that already had a lot of cultural pressure towards it. If the culture was there, I'm sure developers would have hacked away at it and developed it into a strong 2D platform, but without that it was a barrier.

chrisco255 3y ago
A 2D rendering pipeline is trivial. There are numerous hobbysist 2D rendering frameworks for every computer architecture in the past 40 years. It was far more difficult to program N64 in 3D than in 2D. The CPU was more than capable to exceed SNES in every dimension. It was not hard at all. 3D already requires 2D rendering.