How come cartridges, such as the ones used in the Nintendo 64, are able to fit so much 3D models and music but struggle with videos?
In: Engineering
Most video games throughout history are no where near as complex as you think they might be. If a game had to actually hold all of those 3D models and fancy videos and stuff, no game could have existed prior to the modern era where a disc can hold gigabytes of data.
The secret to old video games is that they don’t really contain any sort of finished product. Instead, they give you a few basic building blocks that get re-used a million different ways, and a set of instructions.
With the 3D models specifically, Mario is not stored as a 3D character in the cartridge. He’s a very simple little wire model mode of polygons, and each polygon has a coordinate, which the game knows to fill in with specific colors. To get a visual understanding of this, check “Line Mode” in Goldeneye (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6R4QCaTGRU). This is literally how the game sees itself. Stick figures, and then it knows to insert color/image X into the facial area, etc. A lot of N64 games actually had modes like that, specifically to show off the tech.
Fun fact, N64 carts ranged in capacity from 4mb up to 64mb. A raw-mode picture from my iPhone takes up more space than it’s entire capacity, but using these tricks they were able to build massive worlds. Go back a couple of generations, and NES carts maxed out at 1mb.
3D models don’t take up much space. Naively storing 100 triangles with each of its 3 corners having 3 coordinates of 4 bytes each, that’s a mere 3.6kb even before you start optimizing.
Same with N64 music. It was not recorded, and instead stored as a set of notes much like a midi file. That’s also just a handful of kb per track.
Meanwhile, low quality Youtube 240p video uses 3000-4000 kb/minute, and that’s with a modern high quality codec that the N64 can’t decode.
Because video takes up way more space than those other things. It has to show an entirely different picture roughly 50 times a second. Sometimes less, sometimes more.
N64 had very fast access to storage on the carts compared to PS1 discs but not a lot of storage. Fast motion using colored polygons does great on a platform like that, but video and hi-res textures do poorly.
This just made me remember the FMV sequences for Resident Evil 2 on N64 and what a marvel they were to even have at the time on a cartridge. Totally garbage quality, impressive nonetheless.
3D objects don’t actually take up that much space, depending on complexity.
Drawing a few triangles or square is relatively easy.
The textures on the surface (pictures) are what take up the space. The higher quality the texture, the bigger the file.
Full motion video by comparison takes up a lot of space even compressed. A few minutes of video at a poor resolution like 320 x 200 and with compression can still very quickly take up 30-50 mb of space.
When the largest cartridge for the N64 is 64MB, it doesn’t take long to fill it all up.
This is why CD based games (640-700mb per disk) tended to use a lot more full motion video.
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