Eli5: How is it that a Nintendo or Super Nintendo video game, with its graphics, its music and everything else, fits in a few kb when a single image or a single musical composition uses more than that?
In: Technology
Another reason: The game only stores the source material for what it displays, but the image or the recording has to be able to store anything no matter how it was made.
The Mario game has a picture of Mario in it, but the recording of you playing Mario has to store Mario every frame because it doesn’t know it’s based on the same picture every time.
For the sound, the Mario game has a list of commands like “white noise for 0.1 seconds, beep at 440 Hz for 0.1 seconds, silent for 0.1 seconds, …” but the recording of the game has to record the actual sounds. It can’t turn the beep sound back into the beep command. Also if the sound that comes out of the game isn’t a perfectly shaped beep, it has to record the imperfections in the beep, because it records what is actually there, not what is supposed to be there. Even if it could reverse the beep and store the command, it would have to be “beep at 440Hz for 0.1 seconds, but the beep is slightly distorted like this: <a bunch of numbers to remember the exact amount of distortion>”
Latest Answers