One of the biggest limitations that the Nintendo 64 had was its lack of a dedicated sound card.  Instead of having a sound card in the system that could have produced high quality audio, the design decision was made to just have have the graphics processing share its resources with the audio processing.  As a result, games that pushed the graphics capabilities of the N64 ended up with audio so compressed that often times it just didn’t sound that good.

Just how bad did games end up sounding?  Well, the uncompressed audio from GoldenEye has found its way online and at least to my ears, the difference is night and day at least from what I remember.  This is Grant Kirkhope’s soundtrack for the game the way it was meant to be heard!

Let me know what you think of the difference in the comments below!

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[via:  The Nerdist]