: It's interesting that still use fixed-address loading for some stuff, when
: PCs mostly moved past that decades ago. I wasn't aware the 360 or any of
: the recent consoles were 32-bit, either, since Nintendo did 64-bit back in
: the 90s and PC started using it since a few years before the 360 came out.

On PCs, they don't use a physical fixed-address, but rather use the system's virtual memory APIs to allocate at a known fixed-address (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory). H2V was the only PC game using the Halo engine which supported non-fixed-address map files (due to GFWL's security measures I'm assuming).

It was a no-brainer for them to use it, as loading is a 'quick' sequential read from disc to memory. There's very little manual fixups that have to be done to what is loaded (exception mostly being Havok data).

On the Xbox and 360, they use the system's physical memory APIs to allocate at a known fixed-address. Of course, on these consoles you only have one application running so there's no real need to virtualize memory regions.

The 360 has a 64-bit CPU, but it runs in 32-bit mode (so no 64-bit instructions). Not sure about the PS3.

The XBO on the other hand doesn't support running 32-bit code, like Windows does with Intel x86-64.

Also, apparently very few N64 games used 64-bit instructions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_technical_specifications#Central_processing_unit