With some basic Googling It looks like that the max size was around 512 KB. How is this even possible to fit games of this size onto such little memory? What is this magic?
In: Technology
The game is a grid. Legend of Zelda is 16 screens wide by 8 screens tall. And each screen is a grid of 11×16 tiles. Now let’s say there are 16 different types of tiles, then you only need 4 bits of information for each tile, which means the entire overworld of zelda is only 11kb.
But 11kb is a lot in the 1980’s. They probably used a lot of tricks to make it less than that. How about instead of 16 different types of tyles, each screen only has 4 types of tiles (and those 4 can be different for different screens, so one screen might be sand, rock, water and cave, but another screen might be sand, grave stone, bush, and tree). Now you only need 2 bits for each tile, so your file size is 5.5kb.
And maybe you come up with some other shortcuts… like on a desert screen you make “sand” the default tile and now you only have to store the data for the rocks on the top of the screen.
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