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?

Question

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

Answer 1

Let’s start with an old nintendo first
Say you have a box. The box holds 256(8 bits worth) marbles. Each box representation one dot that you can see. A old tv will have around 300,000 of these boxes used to make the display.

For modern (1080p) display it each box must hold 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 marbles. So the box is much bigger. Also there is 2,073,600 boxes now.

So not only are the boxes much bigger there are more of them. This also happened with sound and all other aspects of computing and is the reason everything is larger now.