![]() ![]() In this case it has 1kbyte mask rom internaly (in addition to the IPL). You take the core and slap on whatever IO you need. It is their own SM5 4-bit microcontroller. PIF is actually a Sharp custom labeled part. I have both chips decapped and I will try to get them posted up here soon. However, the PIF will not load the next IPL until it talks to the security chip that is in each cartridge. This is mapped to the cpu's reset vector via the RCP. The PIF inside the N64 contains a small 2kb IPL that the R4300 cpu boots at power-on reset. SGI designed the entire system from the ground up, with the exception of the security system. They basically took the finished "reference" design from SGI and reimplemented it. I am not sure what Nintendo used to do their own boards. Note the typo on the "developmnet" label. This picture is not mine, it's from That is a Rev 2.0. It had 16mb DRAM onboard so you could upload the ROM image over th GIO bus and debug it right there on the same machine. It is basically a N64 on a board that plugs into a GIO expansion slot. The first fab run was used to build the 1.0 SGI Indy expansion boards. This let them start writing the games before SGI was done taping out the chip. Early devs (Rareware, Paradigm Simulation, Nintendo EAD) had access to the basic C simulation libraries. Verification was done with a C sim and verilog in parallel on SGI Onyx machines. The chip was designed with Verilog and NEC cell libraries. ![]()
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