TOKYO - Nintendo's outspoken president Hiroshi Yamauchi today fired a salvo at rival Sony, saying its challenge to Nintendo's videogame market share "amounts to nothing".

Yamauchi, struggling to hold Nintendo's ground in Japan's dog-eat-dog, one trillion yen ($8.1 billion) battleground for videogame users, also attacked Sony's aggressive software strategy for the 32-bit PlayStation player.

"Most of its software titles are silly and boring," he told a news conference.

"A flood of uninteresting and boring software will destroy Japan's videogame market," Yamauchi warned, adding that there would be a turning point next year for 32-bit game players due to their technical limitations.

Nintendo last June introduced its cutting-edge 64-bit game player, Nintendo64, in Japan in a bid to recapture the top spot in the harshly competitive videogame market.

But sales growth so far remains slower than expected because of the overwhelming strength of newcomer Sony's 32-bit PlayStation.

Domestic sales of Sony's PlayStation by the end of December were five million since its introduction in December 1994, compared to 1.7 million for the Nintendo64, which was introduced in June last year.

Analysts say the most decisive factor is the number of game software titles. While only about 10 titles were available for the Nintendo64 by early January, Sony has amassed more than 600 titles for PlayStation.

Sony has said it plans to further boost the software titles to 800 this year.

Nintendo was also dealt a major blow by Sony last year when two software houses said they would produce the latest versions of their best-selling games "Dragon Quest" and "Final Fantasy" for Sony's PlayStation.

The Dragon Quest series, which has in six titles, has sold 19.3 million games since it was introduced for Nintendo's 16-bit Famicon machine in 1986.

Some analysts believe the shift will substantially hurt Nintendo, with Sony taking more than two million Dragon Quest followers from it.

Asked if there had been any impact on its business from the shift by software makers, Yamauchi declared: "There is virtually no impact on Nintendo's business."

He said although the maker of Dragon Quest had said the new version of the game would start selling in spring 1999, nobody knew for sure when it would actually be launched or whether the new version would prove to be more popular than existing ones.

Despite relatively slow sales in Japan, Nintendo enjoys booming sales of Nintendo64 in the U.S., Yamauchi said.

He said actual sales of Nintendo64 in Japan amounted to 1.7 million units as of the end of the Christmas season since its June 1996 launch, excluding retailers' stocks of an estimated 130,000 to 140,000 players.

The 64-bit Nintendo machine was sold out in the U.S. market, where the company had shipped 2.14 million units since its launch at the end of September.