CEN64 Discussion Forums

Posted: **Mon Oct 21, 2013 3:50 pm**

Does anybody know of more technical documents than those linked to here.

In particular, this seems very useful and to be a part of a larger document which I have however not been able to find online.

Posted: **Mon Oct 21, 2013 8:35 pm**

Such types of data have filled in the matching gaps for CEN64 rather early.
The other document was more of a high-level game design console function reference.

So why would you like to find them?

Posted: **Sun Oct 27, 2013 1:17 am**

Do these help at all?

http://www.zophar.net/documents/n64.html
http://www.romhacking.net/documents/519/

Posted: **Mon Nov 11, 2013 5:26 pm**

max_power wrote:In particular, this seems very useful and to be a part of a larger document which I have however not been able to find online.

Posted: **Mon Nov 11, 2013 6:41 pm**

The problem with most (usually, Google's) patent mirrors is that they are not authentic. Instead of containing the actual text in the PDFs, they rasterize all the vector information (including searchable text) into pixels. Thus, you can't find text quickly, and the downloads are a lot bigger since they comprise more of pixels than text.

Also, I'm surprised that there is a degree of basic RDP commands summary in the above patents, granted that some of the assignee fields include both Nintendo and SGI in unison.

However, none of those patents seem to have any bearing on the RCP::RSP commands. To look for those you have to include "Silicon Graphics, Inc." in the search. After all, the only one I know of to talk a little about them has nothing to do with Nintendo or, specifically, the Nintendo 64, yet talks a little bit about the intended, legal exception-free behavioral cases of the vector loads and stores on the RSP. I used these algorithms to proof-check zilmar's algorithms and rewrite his guesses to better conform to the intended flow.
http://patentimages.storage.googleapis. ... 812147.pdf

Posted: **Mon Nov 11, 2013 7:00 pm**

Thanks Iconoclast, I have just grabbed that PDF and it looks very useful indeed, I spent a lot of time looking for a patent with this info, but I was using "Nintendo" always as a keyword!!
I think I will spend a while looking at patents with "Silicon Graphics, Inc." in the search as you suggested, cheers for the great tip =D

Posted: **Mon Nov 11, 2013 7:12 pm**

As you've correctly determined, the documents provided through hcs' website are indeed part of a much larger, more thorough chain of documents and other code about the system. However, that is best left to an independent study, for several (including, legal) reasons. Suffice it to say that anything more advanced than the level of information here has already been checked and verified against the Nintendo 64's system implementation by some MAME contributors, MarathonMan's CEN64 implementation, zilmar's reverse-engineering, and my RSP interpreter.

And thank you for linking to all of those other public patents. I had found some stuff about the controller and the PIF commands, but I had no idea there were that many overall ones by Nintendo.

Posted: **Tue Nov 12, 2013 12:53 am**

Apologies if this is a stupid question, but do we already have the documents contained on these discs?

Posted: **Thu Nov 14, 2013 11:40 pm**

The Extremist wrote:Apologies if this is a stupid question, but do we already have the documents contained on these discs?

I would have loved to win that auction! I think the info from those discs is floating around, but they may have had extra stuff e.g newer versions of the software =D

I just found this link on Archive: https://archive.org/details/Nintendo_Ul ... ing_Manual
600+ pages of manuals!! (I recommend downloading the PDF with text for selectable text) This should be enough for any budding n64 coder =D

Did a little digging and it came from this lucky guy: http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/sh ... v-software

Posted: **Fri Nov 15, 2013 8:40 am**

Those discs likely contained the software for the SGI Indy and u64 boards.

The documentations that krom is referring to is what a publishing house or certified developer would have received. They describe how to program like libultra and some details of the hardware (but not too much).

Posted: **Fri Nov 15, 2013 6:19 pm**

MarathonMan wrote:Those discs likely contained the software for the SGI Indy and u64 boards.

Some of them, but two of them say "N64 Developer Documents" and "N64 Online Manuals". The sets are also dated October 1999 and August 2000, which sounds more recent than the documents I've seen floating around.

Posted: **Mon Nov 18, 2013 5:25 am**

Yes, those are known.

The much more useful docs are what Iconoclast referred to. And yes, they exist. And no, there is a reason they are not public.

Posted: **Sat Jan 14, 2017 4:45 pm**

Missing is a patent related to Controller Pak. Quite interesting in that it also shows ROM version/game code/game title and other stuff.

https://www.google.com/patents/US20020021272

Posted: **Mon Feb 12, 2018 4:23 pm**

Here's one you missed. It's for the unreleased 64DD game "Mario Maker".
www.google.com/patents/US6115036.pdf

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