– How is it that the first Mario Bros. game was about 32kb, but a JPEG of the game is over 300kbs in 2023?

Question

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?

In: 26

Answer 1

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.