I’ve seen the meme/info-graphic that the original file for Mario Bros. was approx. 32kb, but a picture file would be 10x more.
I’ve googled it and looked, but it seems to have some nebulous answers. Could someone please ELI5?
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Nobody’s trying to preserve computer memory anymore, we don’t need to it’s cheap and plentiful
Nobody’s trying to preserve computer memory anymore, we don’t need to it’s cheap and plentiful
Nobody’s trying to preserve computer memory anymore, we don’t need to it’s cheap and plentiful
when you have limited resources, you optimize (sometimes like crazy). this is quite similar to what demoscene in 80/90′ was doing – squeeze as much from the hardware (not shying away from dirty tricks/hacks) as possible. you still have competitions for 4kB demo, 64kB demo – which by today’s standards are tiny as well.
when you have limited resources, you optimize (sometimes like crazy). this is quite similar to what demoscene in 80/90′ was doing – squeeze as much from the hardware (not shying away from dirty tricks/hacks) as possible. you still have competitions for 4kB demo, 64kB demo – which by today’s standards are tiny as well.
when you have limited resources, you optimize (sometimes like crazy). this is quite similar to what demoscene in 80/90′ was doing – squeeze as much from the hardware (not shying away from dirty tricks/hacks) as possible. you still have competitions for 4kB demo, 64kB demo – which by today’s standards are tiny as well.
I programmed a flight simulator (real, not a game) for the am RAF jet fighter. It had a 64k memory.
Bits were valuable and reused. A byte that was wind speed at the beginning of a subroutine was reused at the end of a subroutine.
A byte would be split into 3 different values.
I programmed a flight simulator (real, not a game) for the am RAF jet fighter. It had a 64k memory.
Bits were valuable and reused. A byte that was wind speed at the beginning of a subroutine was reused at the end of a subroutine.
A byte would be split into 3 different values.
I programmed a flight simulator (real, not a game) for the am RAF jet fighter. It had a 64k memory.
Bits were valuable and reused. A byte that was wind speed at the beginning of a subroutine was reused at the end of a subroutine.
A byte would be split into 3 different values.
One of the issue is that modern pictures formats assume that you can have every available color in every single pixel on the screen and that any pattern of pixels is possible to be in that picture.
The NES could theoretically display up to 56 colors, but it couldn’t display each color everywhere instead a pallette of 13 colors had to be chosen for each tile of 16 by 16 pixels.
You can create some beautiful graphics despite those limitations if you select the boundaries where the palette changes carefully.
You could also have some nice effects by changing pallets to create illusion of motion.
The tiles themselves were also not all drawn but puzzled together from a small library. So you might have had three different types of background rocks in a cave that became background clouds or bushes outside by drawing the same picture with a pallette of white and blue or green instead of brown.
So really you only needed to say which of the tiles from your library went where and what pallette they were using to draw the background instead of each individual pixel.
To draw a picture that was 256×240 pixels you really only had a matrix of 32 by 30 tiles and that you assigned form a small library of 256 background tiles. and you also had a grid 16 by 15 areas that you assigned one of your four pallets each.
This allowed you to tell the computer what to draw for the background with a tiny minimum of instructions compared to telling it how to draw the background pixel by pixel with each pixel being bale to be one of hundred of thousands of colors.
You still needed a bit of extra space to describe all the possible background tiles and the pallettes but those were fixed costs that wouldn’t get any bigger if you made the level bigger.
The moving parts, sprites, like Mario and the enemies he jumped on were similar except that you could only use a very small numbers of colors. This limitation influenced the design of many iconic charters that date this far back.
Overall it was all designed to use the tiny amount of available space as efficiently as possible.
Modern graphics formats try to use space efficiently too but not anywhere to that degree.
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