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
As an example, the clouds in the sky and the bushes on the ground are the exact same image, except one was white and one was green. Neither one of them needs to look photorealistic. Mario is scarcely more than a stick figure and only has very few poses. Computer storage space and processing ability were both expensive commodities when that game was released, and to make a playable/ enjoyable game a lot of graphics quality had to be sacrificed. Programmers spent a *lot*of time trying to eke just a little bit more performance out of the computer because every little scrap mattered.
A JPEG, on the other hand, Is a technology from almost a decade later when processor power and memory had advanced quite a bit. A JPEG is designed to look photo realistic – it is designed to store information that makes up a picture in a way that natural images look OK to humans while not using a relatively huge amount of storage space either. The trade-off, though, is you are trading a much better quality of graphic for more storage space and a heavier load for the processor to lift to display the file.
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