Watch any internet video on the subject to see an example of such strange game behavior.
Why does this happen?
EDIT: oh my this blew up didn’t it? Thanks for all the replies!
In: Technology
Unlike other consoles, the N64 *doesn’t* run any code directly off the cartridge – instead it copies it to memory and runs it from there. During normal gameplay, the console may not be reading from the cartridge at all. In theory, you could just remove the cartridge entirely and keep playing the game normally, with only a few glitches occurring whenever the game tries to load some extra data from the cart.
The only reason you can’t do this is because of a pin on one side of the console. That pin exists for the sole purpose of detecting whether the cartridge was removed, and shutting off if so. By titling the cart, though, you keep this pin connected (to prevent this shutdown) but disconnect the other pins so that data can’t be transfered from the cart anymore. The game keeps running thanks to the code in RAM, but all attempts to load additional data from the cart return garbage.
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