A lot of people hear about why the N64 was difficult to program, but might not understand why. On paper, the system seems fairly simple, it's only got three components (CPU, GPU, one allotment of unified RAM), and no crazy parallel processing systems like Saturn or PS3.
I think a lot of people tried to look too deeply into the type of RAM (or the texture cache), but the answer is really much more simple. And it's in the location nobody speculating looked.
I found a forum post by one of the lead programmers of Burnout 3
>the problem wasn't the type of memory on the N64, but rather the fact that the memory controller was on the GPU and it gave priority to rendering for bus accesses. So the CPU was always sitting there waiting, and waiting and waiting.http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?26634-PS2-vs-Dreamcast-Graphics&p=640528#post640528he also says in another post that the reason gamecube didn't get burnout 3 was because the console wasn't cut out for it, but that's not a /vr/ discussion