Hi welcome to Tear Down Tuesday No I'm not going to tear down a blue rubber ESD mat I'm going to tear down a Nintendo 64 which I have been reliably told has been sitting in my mailbag for quite some time. So let's go up here to the mailbag shelf and have a look shall we? I Think it's going to be this puppy down here Oh lost a couple down the back of the bench. Oh oh, hang on. Got to retrieve them and here it is I Guess you could, uh, call this a combined mailbag SL Tear down it is from Dave Cheney from Ashfield Thank you very much Dave don't need my knife for this.

It's got one of these convenient ripoff things and I hope I got the right package. Otherwise, we're just doing a mailbag. Yep, here it is Taada. Hey Nintendo 64 Beauty a check out that retro goodness M Hi Dave I've really enjoyed your tear down Tuesday segments, especially ones that focus on older gears.

Someone was throwing out this N64 unit I Thought it would make an interesting subject for a tear down I'm sure it will thank you very much. Dave he's from Sydney as well and Tada Nintendo 64 Dave has told me on Twitter that um, it doesn't work. so uh, what's what's this in here? This is that mean that's the cartridge slot I don't know I've never used a Nintendo 64, never had one. um I don't know what that is at all.

Sure, all you, uh gamer afficianados are uh screaming at me right about now I know what that is. It's probably even written on the front. There we go: Memory expansion H and it looks like it's missing its AC adapter as well and that's a rather neat look at that. They've got a big recess in there which plugs in.

It is uh 3.3 volt at 2.7 amps and 12 volts at Uh8 8 amps for ages 8 and up. It's lucky lucky I'm older than eight although the wife tells me I'm about 4 years old. but there you go. multi out little custom connector down in there and uh, we've got ourselves look at custom slot I Believe this was the last of the slot-based uh video games, at least from Nintendo.

Anyway, after this they moved to Uh CDs and if you want to know some of the facts and figures on the N64 it is Nintendo's uh, fifth gaming console and uh, released in 1996 W discontinued in 2003, so it had a six-year lifespan or thereabouts. although I'm sure right at the end of its uh lifespan, it wasn't popular. That's why they, uh, discontinued it of course. and they've sold over almost 33 million of these little puppies worldwide.

Absolutely incredible. And on the bottom side here, under a slot, we have an expansion connector. It almost looks like it's perfectly in line with the one on the top and the same type. So uh I wonder if they're a wide in parallel or not? I Guess we'll find out when the crack when we crack the thing open unfortunately I don't like the look of the screws in this thing and check out that evil piece of work right there.

Some bastard manager at Nintendo decided we don't want people getting into these. We'll put a security screw on there. look at that. it's almost like a like a um Inside Out Torx or something like that.

It's got little uh uh, grooves around the edges like that I mean it's not too hard to make a tool to get into that I mean you could uh, you know, hack a flathead or something to go in either side of that I guess but uh yeah, what a what a pain in the ass. along with all the custom connectors and everything on this thing I went hey, let's put in, we don't want any bastard plane with this thing. let's use a security screw bastards. and I've got a bit like this which might well in theory could uh fit but I think it's a bit too fat on the end there so don't like my chances and it turns out I can actually get in there with a pair of pliers and little needlenose Plies and turn that around.

it's going to take a while. Ah, buger. It Screw this. Well, it turns out that there are only two bastard screws on that thing that I had to uh, drill out so didn't do any lasting damage there.

Not going to reuse this thing. of course it is non workking, but uh, that wouldn't You can always tape it back together. nothing you can't fix with a bit of tape and yeah, you just sit it there like that. Not a problem.

So let's lift the skirt on this thing and uh, see what's into a bit of dust? No dead cockroaches? No jeez. Not much in here at all and that's pretty much uh what? I expected. We got to take all this metal work off. Of course they've done all this.

Um, it's a hell of a lot of uh shielding on there that's uh, really built and BRAC stuff I mean woo, unbelievable, but uh yeah, very simplistic. I Don't expect much on here except I um under this. When we lift it up I expect to see the uh main CPU the uh, GPU uh secondary processor and really not much else. Maybe some glue, logic and uh, other stuff.

um I don't even know if uh, there's going to be any power supply cuz it was 3.3 volts directly in here. which uh, Powers the main logic I'm sure just maybe through some uh, common mode chokes or something like that. but uh yeah. I Don't expect a a huge amount in this thing at all.

It'll be very very simplistic. You watch and of course it. Look, you know it's super rugged. The build of this thing, you know, gez you got to practically run over this thing with a truck and I don't think it's uh, uh, going to uh, cause an issue.

So yeah, let's pop all this metal work off and have a look actually. I'm uh, going to guess that this top plate on here is um, acting as a heat sink effectively cuz I can't see any mechanical uh, purpose for it really? if you have a look at the case that just sort of, you know, slots on there like that and there are these vent holes uh there which are essentially just over that. I mean there's no fan in this thing I'm not sure I've never used one I'm not sure how um, hot these things got, but uh yeah. I mean there's a lot of screws on there so uh, like maybe, um, there's some little heat sink blocks inside which help get the uh, hair, spread the heat, uh, transfer the heat out to this external metal work and it's all passively cooled.

And of course with this sort of consumer product as well, they would have known very well. Got some dust there? Um, they would have known very well that uh, they were going to sell like uh, 10 million or so of these things or you know it would have, they definitely would have known it would, uh selling its Millions even if it was a, um I guess a failure you could call it. but uh, they you know when you start talking about that sort of volume, you really design your uh products with uh Manufacturing in mind. Dfm designed for manufacturing.

um not sure in what all of these screws come off actually. so I'll just take them all off I guess and uh yeah, so it's all about Dfm designed for manufacturing. So I mean all this, uh, all this uh, metal work isn't uh, necessarily, uh, cheap so you only do it if you have to. um but of course they you know, had to to pass all the uh EMC requirements and stuff.

but uh yeah, they've gone well. let's uh, passively cool this thing and uh, not, worry about a fan and all that sort of stuff and system integration. of course, as I said I expect to see the two main chips in here, the main CPU and the graphics chip and uh, that and pretty much the rest is just, uh, you know, um just really Cheapo stuff. So uh, they've would have put a lot of system engineering into this thing and we'll talk about the GPU in a minute.

but uh, let's get all this off. Jeez. should have got my electric screwdriver out for this one. Now you can tell they're taking EMC uh compliance very seriously.

by the way that they G to the trouble to manufacture in this bracket here which uh then just that wipe on there just connects the shield of the socket in there to the main shazzy down here. So we they shielding that socket really really well. They've gone to quite a bit of effort in there. Look, they've even put those uh uh, key in um, studs in there, two screws to hold it down.

There's an extra manufacturing step with two screws and yeah, theyve really decided that they have to do that because um, if they you know you could have optimized this out. you know if your uh, your first units came off the manufacturing line or something like that and you notice that that there's um, well, even sort of a pre-production type run uh, you might have done your basic EMC uh tests on this thing with and without this bracket and well, if you didn't need it, well you know, take it out but obviously made it into the final production version so you know if you could you would shave a couple of cents off there and you'll notice the main connector down in there. How there's uh, what is it? There's two four five pins which uh, stick up higher than all the others and they they're on both sides. Of course they would be a ground contacts designed to uh mate first before all the other pins and that just gives you a bit more consistency in terms of your user hot swapping of these uh modules.

You know it it. You know that if you know that your ground contacts are going to connect first in your cartridge, then you've got a KN condition to work on for your um, uh, hot swappable uh, hot plug design. And if this thing is a heat sink and it certainly does, uh, seem to serve no other purpose than a heat sink. um, they really haven't uh, gilded the Lily on this.

They haven't really gone to town because it's not a multiple fin, uh, heat sink like this because it's all about the surface area with uh, heat sinks and and uh, yeah, so they really, you know that's just very basic, uh, form, they've just, you know, uh, just form that thing very simple instead of like a uh a a machined aluminium uh block which is much more expensive in production so maybe some compromise there? Maybe The design team said oh, we need some more heat sink and you know the uh, uh Bean counters are going well. how much does that cost? Well, I'd love to use a black anodized, you know, finned extruded aluminium heat sink and they went, oh no, too much, cost too much. No. can we just go for a bit of uh, folded aluminium like that? Oh yeah, kind of.

it'll be okay. I guess let me run the numbers again and you know they come back and well, that's what they've decided to go with. So here we go. we're almost almost there.

I Think do I have to get those out as well holding down the connector? I'm not sure. oh yeah, that's probably it. We got some really extra long screws in there so that should now, hopefully Tada lift out and we'll get shielding on the bottom of course as well. but uh, all this should hey prize apart.

There we go. Few passiv on the bottom, not a huge amount I see a couple of uh uh, transistors or they marked d doodes. couple of yeah, not much, but uh, just some general bypassing and lots of main power tracers here. used it.

look. we got a nice low impedance path there with lots of Vas around here and here, so they're obviously getting that uh Power across there. but uh, there we go. let's um, it looks like yeah, we've got power here routed down to the mechanical uh switch on the front so that is a good clunk in.

well it's a cheap ass sliding switch I was going to say it's a good clunky Mechanicals we're just not. it's just a cheap ass. uh contact slider so nothing special there. but uh yeah, we got our passives and well let me try and flip this metal work on the top off and to die Here we go I can see some extra metal under there where all those screws plugged in and aha taada look at that.

Oh was uh 100% right there that was there. Clearly got these um, aluminium blocks on there. there. we go.

There's our got our Compound on the bottom there. They just yeah. they. they're not the glue type.

they've just oh, stuck those down. Ah, get off there we go. Not a problem and they've done that. Oh, and their memory as well.

They've heat sunk the memory there we go must be screaming along at a rate of megahertz and uh, that's it. That's pretty much what I expected. The two chip solution we'll have a look at with the macro lens, but we're going to have the CPU and the uh Graphics uh chip I'm not sure which one's what yet. We've got our memory memory expansion socket right here.

You know they're trying to. You know, you can argue what their uh uh thing here. you know, optional extra. They're trying to sell it.

They could have put that memory on the main board, but of course it keeps the price point down and gives you an extra uh, retail sale as well. Some sort of upsell with these things of course with the uh memory slot, but that looks like it's just tied in there. There's nothing special. doesn't look to be any uh protection in that at all.

Actually, no, there's bypassing on the back, but there's no like, uh, you know, um, there's no protection in on the inputs there at all. It just looks like it hooks straight onto the memory bus there. But yeah, they were transferring the heat directly out of these devices. um, straight onto that heat sink there and a few Miss laneous stuff around here we'll take a look at, but that is pretty much it.

and that's what you'd expect in a you know, when you manufacture things in the millions, something like this, you want to get down to a couple of Chip solution. Absolute bare bone stuff. And of course, the other thing which is notable. Uh, in its absence from this entire design is any wiring whatsoever.

This thing rolls off the uh assembly line of course. Uh, the um, well, they look like they wave. Yeah, they look like they wave solded. Everything's uh, wave solded so that's fully machine assembled.

even the uh, main connector over here. possibly. um I I don't know, but yeah. basically.

uh, that rolls off the assembly line even if there is, um, the odd thing which is, uh, hand solded. but uh, then they pretty much just bang pop it straight into the box. and that's it. now.

Apparently there were a lot of versions of this board actually produced for Ious markets and uh, some chips weren't fitted and some were combined. various things and stuff like that. so I'm not exactly sure uh which version I've got here, so uh, forgive me if I get it wrong, but let's take a look at some of the individual chips on here. and by the way, uh, date code on this thing.

uh, 1997? uh early weeks 97s and first up, we've got ourselves an amp. Nus n n us uh stands for Nintendo Ultimate 64 so you'll see that branded on every single one of these chips now. presumably that's an audio amp. you can see the large caps around that coupling that now of course.

um, this, uh, whether or not it's a fully Uh custom chip for Nintendo or whether or not it's just a uh re labeled off the shelf one I Don't know, but every single chip in this almost every chip is uh relabeled uh with Nus and moving up here, we have a nonnus uh branded chip and it's a 948 F it's actually a Buu 94 8f and that's a 16bit stereo audio deck. so uh, that one, um of course is just uh, driving the main amp here and that's where you get your stereo audio from. and I haven't researched into what these two jumpers are here. They look like a surface mount um cap, but they're actually labeled uh, Jp4 and Jp5 and as you can see, the pins are shorted together like that.

and if we spin the board around here near the 9480 f, we have a D in Nus, which is actually a video deck. a combined video deck and video encode a hence DAC encoder I Guess that Uh stands for there and I Believe this one was only fitted to the power only modules either. Something else was fitted for the Ntsc or they didn't have it at all. presumably Uh, they fitted another type in there and we have ourselves our main clocks here.

These are Mx83 by the way. Um, any data sheets for these will be L into the Uh notes down below and they take your basic 3 4, MHz Crystal Oscillator and depending on Uh, the pin strapping configuration can either multiply that by 4 * 14 or 7 17 * 4. So to give you an output in the order of 200 MHz It's a Ramb Bus clock generator and the Ram here is H comes standing with 4 Mbes. an additional 4 Mbes in the Ram expansion pack and these are actually Uh RAM Amb chips.

So once again, uh, you know, custom branded with the Uh Nintendo name and part number there working up to what 500 mahz with a peak bandwidth according to Wikipedia of 562.org NEC VR 4300 which is a derivative of the Myips technology r4300 I And yes, it was actually manufactured by NC for Nintendo and this one was actually clocked at 93.75 megahertz and uh, this made it one of the most powerful Uh consoles of its day, of course. But uh yeah, if it had like a six-year Uh time frame by the time it got to the end of it, eh, not so crash hot. And also Limited In terms of Uh gameplay with the Uh cartridge based system, Basically, you simply could not fit as much Uh data as you could on a DVD based systems which are also out at the time. And although this is a 64-bit Um processor I believe they actually used it mostly in 32-bit Uh mode which made for a more uh compact memory uh structure and stuff like that so they could fit more into your lousy 4 megab of memory or your eight Um with the Uh expansion uh cartridge.

So and so most of the time they weren't utilizing the full 64-bit potential of this CPU And here's the Graphics processor: the RCP or Reality Uh Co-processor module actually Uh designed by Um SGI in Uh conjunction with Nintendo and it runs at 62.5 MHz and uh, it's got two modules inside. One is the Uh Reality Drawing processor Great Name the RDP and the Reality Signal Processor or RSP woohoo and uh. Both of these Uh communicate with the other modules via an internal 28 bit Uh data bus at 1 gig bytes per second. So pretty darn quick.

No wonder they needed the Uh heat sink block on there and uh, spreading that heat out because this thing probably got a bit warm. Now the RSP inside here or the reality Uh Signal Processor is actually Um in reality a Myips Um R4000 based uh integer Vector processor and that did uh, various stuff in terms of Uh lighting and Uh transforms and things like that. and then the RDP the reality display processor is the Uh rasterizer and that handles all the Um Zed buffer computation and all that stuff. If you're into your gaming Graphics architecture and that RSP part of it can also do the audio as well.

but apparently the main CPU can do audio. so depending on how you program this sucker, how you program your individual game, you can get the Uh Graphics code processor to do the audio or you can Ts that to the the main processor. and of course the graphics on this thing are 16.8 million colors so no slouch there. only a lousy 640 by 480 pixels.

but uh I guess that was, you know, not bad in its day, but of course eh. very old school these days. And then we've got our Piff Nus which is the peripheral interface uh chip and that handles um, all of the peripheral stuff as the name says, the Uh controllers and that sort of stuff. but it also contains um, uh, some sort of security in the as well so you can't uh play back uh games from a different region.

So I don't know about hacks on the Nintendo 64 but if you're going to hack it, that's probably where a lot of the action's going to happen and that looks like a Texas Instruments Part I'm not entirely sure uh what that sucker is, but uh, it's obviously tied into the peripheral interface chip somehow. there we go. We do have a 5vt rail in this thing powered from a a Bog standard 7805 regulator, using the PCB as a heat syn there direct from the 12volt input, so that couldn't be uh drawing. You know, a huge amount of um Power there.

Obviously, with that sort of heat sink and the 7vt drop on that thing, it's not like it's going to be uh, driving an amp or something like that. Now you might think this main socket here would be solded in, but you'd be wrong. Tada Look at that. It's actually, uh, just socketed just pulls out like that.

They've got lots of uh RFI contacts along there which go down to the main pads on the main board. but the bottom connector down in there is the one that's actually um, solded. the expansion connector on the back. Look at that and look at all the uh, ugly flux residue on that thing.

They've hand solded that one. So yeah, they must be really confident with the uh wiping action inside that uh socket. I Mean this is the main car CD one and it's going to get, you know, an absolute pounding from, uh, these kids. just these gamer kitties just slamming these cartridges in and out like crazy.

So uh yeah, that's uh, that's really actually quite surprising. Although, um, once again, if you did that, maybe they've done that deliberately because if you use solder joints, you're going to actually apply stress to them. You got to make sure your connectors designed well to sort of take the stress off the uh pins. but in this case, it probably you know it might actually be rather clever in that uh, you know, they slam down the cartridge and uh, you're not in fear of actually, uh, breaking anything.

you know, cracking a solder joint due to, uh, you know, stress and shock. So yeah, that could be a rather clever design. And of course, there's nothing in way of, uh, protection for that uh, expansion bus at all. just you know, flows straight into the main uh chip.

There nothing doing. Someone was a fan of their nice curved traces there. Look at that. Oh, they've mixed and matched.

Look at that. That one's got a uh, that one's got a 45 angle on it. The resta nice and smooth so the electrons just race nice and smoothly around the bin there. actually there wouldn't be any uh Doppler shift noise cuz they'd be you moving so slow at that uh, drift velocity rate crawling along.

and as we said at the start, really nothing doing on the bottom here like there's the main graphic chip there and they've got a huge amount of Vis in there. real low, inductive uh High current path for the main chip in there, probably working at uh, that' be direct from the 3.3 Oh, here it is. even look Little arrows 3.3 volts there it is Wizzard down here. India Main CPU chip with all its bypassing there, lots of V's lots of V stitching in there and going around here.

Oh, off the expansion connector as well. 3.3 Vols on on there. it's all three so it all be 3.3 Vol Iio on there. and uh, down to your main graphic chip down here.

Oh, look at all the V action in there and put one in the middle because it looks sexy. So there you have it. That's uh, pretty much the main board in a nutshell, are very nicely designed, very minimalist design and huge attention to detail are uh paid in terms of the shielding and uh, you know, uh Emi stuff. I mean you know they've really gone to town there.

Absolutely phenomenal and of course all single board, uh construction. I Mean you know the only sort of dodgy thing is, you know your hand assembled connector up here. but apart from that, you know really clever systems engineering to go into that. But of course they would have spent a lot of engineer hours on this.

uh, let me tell you, trying to, uh, perfect it and all the variations of it for the different markets as well. By the way, I Forgot to take note of the rather uh usual package on the Ramb buus memory up here. Look, there's only four pins on the top of here and uh there. So all the Io is along the bottom down here.

There you go, you don't see much of them. Well I don't I can't recall seeing that anywhere today. I Could be wrong, but jeez, yeah, it's not common. and I've powered this thing up and it's uh, much lower than it's uh specified? Max or you know, average I don't know what it is marked on the uh back there? uh, presum, because uh, there's no cartridge plugged in and of course we're not running a game, but hey, both the 12vt and 3.3 volt rails are pulling something.

We'll just do some basic probing around here. Yes, I've got my low impedance attachment on there for the ground. so let's probe this. Crystal down here.

it says 14.7 megahertz so we should be able to don't even need to read the pin out. So I can guess. There we go: 14.7 bang and the other one up here. that one says 17.7 Hang on, let's get another ground point and there we go: 17.7 34 megahertz.

So those two uh crystals are working. Not a problem at all. Let's look at our 5V rail up here. I Mean this suck is not supposed to be working.

but yeah, there it is. Bang! 5 volts. We're at 1 V per division there, so we're all working. So the main clocks are going so let's have a look at the output of those and that lower chip from the 14.

7 MHz we are getting bang on 50 MHz output on that sucker and the top one up there driven from the 7.7 mahz Crystal it's uh, clock going off to the uh, uh, D inco the um encoder uh chip plus the main graphic processor. that one is 49.6 57 now I can't see any memory bus action on the first chip I'm not sure if there separate memory interfaces or not, but uh, we getting really no activity there at all, nothing doing um, so either you know, presumably the thing just, uh, shuts down and does nothing when there's no cartridge, um, instored or this thing is, um, yeah, grossly, uh, faulty and uh, we're getting nothing. So I'm not sure what, uh, normal system operation is supposed to be there, but uh, it, You know it wouldn't surprise me if the chip just shuts down and does absolutely nothing like the graphics ship does nothing until um, well, and the main CPU would be running so it' be um, sharing some of that presumably and well, I you know H I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me if it, just you know, went into some sort of hibernation mode just waiting to uh, uh, plug a cartridge into there and the termination voltage which has its own low Dropout regulator down in here that's uh, measuring yeah, 2 and 1/2 volts and I'm not seeing anything between the two, uh, the CPU and the graphics processor either. So really yeah.

either this thing's dead as a doo or it's in, uh, some sort of uh, weight SL hibernation mode for that cartridge. But hold on to your hat folks. We are getting some data on this uh video bus here, which goes over to the Uh D encoder. Looks like the same stuff on all the pins.

So yeah, interesting, but uh, there is H Certainly something happening there in terms of the video. I Mean that's uh, that's just the same thing going on at, you know, 12.4 MHz There's quite a few pins there have exactly the same signal on it. so I'm sorry to tell you, that's uh, as boring as the proverbial bat poo. I Don't uh, see anything exciting there at all? I Was hoping, to, you know, maybe get out my active probe and measure.

you know, a couple hundred MHz or something like that. but nah, nothing doing there at all. So I'm not sure what the deal is there I was told it was faulty, so yeah, who knows. Um, so thanks very much Dave for sending that into mailbag slown Tuesday And if you like the segment, as always, please give it a big thumbs up and the place to discuss it is the Eev blog.

Forum We probably 150 or 200 people are hanging out right now just expressing their opinion, answering helping questions. It's fantastic place to be. the Forum Anyway, that is a very interesting look inside. A Uh 1996 SL well this one 97 vintage Nintendo N64 I Hope that brought a tear to the eye of some people who have fun memories of that catch you next time.

Um.