A *very* important question about the Nintendo 64

It's about the Expansion pak, which doubled the amount of RAM of the console from 4 to 8 megabytes; here's my doubt: why the hell did Nintendo make this an accessory when OBVIOUSLY there's enough space to fit in the "expansion" perfectly? Couldn't the Nintendo 64 just have 8 megs of ram to begin with? It totally could!

It may be that the console came with the expansion pak pre-installed (that's another question), but that would make even less sense! Why would you put a removable RAM module on a console? That's like having the option of taking out the GPU of a PlayStation. Was the reason for the Expansion pak's existence just cash grab, or did it indeed make sense?

Maybe to have that in there at launch would have raised the price by too much at a time it wasn't as necessary. Anyhow, might not remember correctly, but I thought the expansion slot already had the 4MB in the slot, that it was basically a swap out for those who bought the uograde. Pretty sure future iterations came with the 8MB RAM in it after that.

jesus...megabytes. I can't believe we used to measure things in that unit, and not even that long ago!

Hell I had a 36.6 k modem just before the turn of the millennium and that's measured in kilobytes. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR wrwwrrwrwrwrrrwrrwrwrwr shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh You've got mail!"

Sorry I know I am not helping but this really takes me back

@mrbojangles25: hah I know right? I recently set up camp in an old lab that had a bunch of old computer hardware tucked away in it, and it brought back memories.

To the OP, I agree with Lamprey: there's physical room for the bigger chip, but they probably thought it would cost too much and so they decided to make it an accessory. RAM isn't that interesting, really, because it's just temporary storage space, so if 4mb was sufficient for most of their software at the time they probably did the math and figured it was better as an add-on. Most PCs don't ship with the maximum supported RAM for the same reason - why inflate the cost for those who don't need it?

It was made to be cost-effective: instead of adding expensive extra chips to the single cartridges (see Starfox, Yoshi's Island and Doom on SNES) they decided to make the N64 console expandable and save on cartridge production costs. Keep in mind that Nintendo expected to do much more with the expansion pack, which is why they gave it away (almost) free with Donkey Kong 64.

There was very good reason for it. Future add-ons to the console, such as the 64DD, would require more system memory to work, so they added the memory expansion port for that reason.

Of course, 64DD never really became a thing outside Japan, but it did make full use of the expansion.

Note that in most N64 games, the memory expansion does nothing, and does not enhance the game in any way. Many think that the pack automatically ups the reso of all N64 games, but that just isn't true. It only enhances handful of N64 games, and thus is not really worth purchase.

@mrbojangles25 yeah, it's pretty amazing where we've gotten. If you told me in that era that in the future there would be computers and consoles with 8 thousand megs to 16 thousand megs and more of RAM, I would die of laughter

Anyway, if Nintendo didn't make the system 8 megs from the beginning to save on cost, then why in the world they kept cartridges that costed 10-20 dollars to produce? Way more expensive than the 1 dollar CDs Sony used.

@henrythefifth is the one I agree the most with. But there were games that totally needed the expansion to work properly, like Majora's Mask and Donkey Kong 64, but I suppose developers are the ones to blame in this case.

That is true. Some devs really did 'regular' N64 games that actually needed the memory expansion to run. I think this was a good idea, because it allowed the devs to make those games bigger and better.

But the reason most devs ignored the memory expansion was because it was supposed to run along with the 64DD. So many devs decided to wait for the 64DD to launch worldwide before committing to making bigger and better N64 games.

But that never happened, and nintendo moved on to GameCube, which was a good thing all round.