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
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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