MAKUHARI, JAPAN, 1995 NOV 27 (NB) -- Nintendo Co. Ltd. has introduced its Nintendo Ultra 64 home video game to the world at the company's annual video game exhibition, called Shoshinkai, that was held over the past weekend.
Nintendo is leapfrogging competitors Sega, Sony, and 3DO with the 64-bit Ultra, which a spokesperson told Newsbytes will be sold as the Nintendo 64 in Japan. Those companies have already introduced machines with 32-bit processors, referring to the speed the data is processed. Nintendo elected to skip the 32-bit step and, instead, be the first to bring a 64-bit game to market. Faster chips allow games to offer more realistic video and respond more quickly.
Nintendo did stick with plug-in cartridge games rather than switching to compact disks like its competitors. When the company made that decision in 1994, it said CD-ROMs, despite their higher storage capacity, take more time to access data.
The new machine has a feature called a "memory pack," a microcassette-size memory storage unit that can be plugged into the back of the controller. That allows players to save their current position in the game, turn it off, and later pick up where they left off.
Dallas, Texas-based Paradigm Simulation is one of the first developers to announced a game for the Ultra 64. The company unveiled its flight simulation game Pilotwings 64 at Shoshinkai.
Pilotwings 64 is a sequel to Pilotwings, which sold over two million copies for the Super NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) machine. Paradigm said it developed the game with Vega Ultravision, a software tool for the development of three-dimensional (3-D) games.
Pilotwings 64 includes first and third person views, several different aircraft and multiple roles to choose from, realistic landscapes, special effects and animation and several playing levels to accommodate players' various skill levels.
A Paradigm spokesperson told Newsbytes Pilotwings 64 will ship in April, 1996. Pricing hasn't been announced yet, she said.
Ultra 64 uses a Silicon Graphics Reality coprocessor and a MIPS RISC (reduced instruction set computing) chip to smooth jagged edges (jaggies) from objects, and maintain the "natural texture" of objects independent of how close the player is to the object.
A feature called real-time depth buffering removes hidden surfaces during the real-time rendering process of a scene, which allows developers to "create 3-D environments more efficiently," claims the company.
Automatic load management enables the objects in each scene to "move smoothly and realistically" by automatically tuning the graphics processing, according to Silicon Graphics.
Nintendo said Ultra 64 is scheduled to ship in the US in April, 1996, with a price tag of about $250.
The game will be displayed at the Consumer Electronics Show that opens January 5, 1996 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
(Jim Mallory/19951127/Press contact: Melinda Conkling, Springbok Technologies for Paradigm, 214-480-9458 or Alison Holt Brummelkamp, Golin/Harris for Nintendo, 213-623-4200)