Yeah, I loved the N64. It just boggles the mind at times--still--that they stuck with cartridges. As best as I can remember, the system itself was actually superior to the PS and it was the cartridges that put a check on all the system could have done while the PS was able to use the rapidly advancing nature of CDs to cover up a lot of system limitations.
Ninty's official statement is that it reduces load times and were more practical than CDs (which is ironic, because a lot of developers had to resort to compression in order to maximize the cartridge's limited space, resulting in loading screens while the game decompresses the data).
A lot of people believe Nintendo chose cartridges as a means of anti piracy measure, since it's a lot harder to reproduce than CD, and because cartridges meant that they'd be the only supplier and will have better control over the licenses. Of course, if those were really their reasons for snubbing the CD format, it blew up in their face because it turned off a lot of third party devs.
The part about anti piracy thing was useless as people were still able to dump the games using the 64DD, and the smaller filesizes of the ROM images meant that they're easier to transfer over the net, which is then made worse by the appearance of a functional emulator even before the system was finished with its life cycle.
....masturbate to Donkey Kong Country.
You can do that with the game's box cover. I used to do it for Metroid, I just stopped when I found out that Samus is a girl.
