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.
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