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
The video chip that rendered the images on screen was pretty weak, so to make it more efficient, they used a quick screen tiling mode, were you repeat indexed tiles on the screen, each tile being encoded in a efficient 2 bits per pixel, and the color also using indexing in a 4 color pallette shared by 4 tiles. This ensured a small sized image and game as a whole, but made it pretty difficult to draw anything complex. Modern hardware is more powerful and can render pretty complex images with no regards to size, so new image encoding schemes will create bigger images but they can also recreate complex and realistic images, what the NES could not. Also, modern computers don’t understand the NES encoding scheme, ao if you try to make a code to “translate” it, let’s say in python, the code is gonna also have a couple of kilobytes. It goes to show that the size of the game and the image is a result of the limitations of the era.
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