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
> …a single image or a single musical composition uses more [than a few kb]
This is a modern understanding of video games, where Call of Duty textures take up gigabytes of space. On the NES, a sprite is often 16×16. That’s only 256 pixels of information to store. On top of that, because the technical limitations of the NES, a pixel could only select from so many colors. I believe techniques were often used to select a color from a palette, which would require less space than storing the raw color data itself. Rather than a byte to store the exact color for a pixel, you could select from one of four colors with just 2 bits. That would make Mario’s 16×16 sprite take up 512 bits – about 5% of a kilobyte – if you stored it this way.
Similar considerations are made for music. Actual music files are quite large as you have to store all the tiny, tiny, tiny information picked up in the recording. But video game music back in the NES/SNES era wasn’t recorded. They used a standard called MIDI where instead of the game storing and playing back an audio file, it would store the notes of a song as well as the instruments/other info about these notes. It was very space efficient to store what was effectively sheet music and reconstruct it on the fly, as if playing the instruments, as opposed to storing and just playing back the chunky audio files.
There are so many more examples of this ruthless and necessary efficiency in this era of game development that is totally lost nowadays. I would recommend doing some YouTube binges about this topic as it’s incredibly fascinating how these game creators were able to do so much with so little.
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