Waccoon wrote:
Nintendo shattered their chance at the 64-bit market by using a high quality but dreadfully slow polygon engine in the N64, and tied it to ROM cartridges for piracy reasons. They practically handing the market over to Sony, who had very low license fees. Nintendo haven't really recovered -- or changed their business model.
Gamecube is a terrific piece of engineering, far better than the haphazard PS2, but Nintendo's licensing scheme is still their undoing. If not for Game Boy Advance and DS, they'd be in big trouble.
I really have to disagree about the polygon engine in the N64. At the time it was released there was nothing like it.. It's graphics system was designed by Silicon Graphics for Nintendo and honestly the playstation wasn't hardware wise competitive with the CPU they used.. However, the choice of using rom cartridges and licensing was a big problem..
