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
jpg is supposed to be able to represent any type of picture. It’s especially good at compressing photos. Photos have a lot of colors. jpg is capable of representing more than 16 million colors in each dot. (256 levels or Red, Green, and Blue each). jog has a lot of smart ways to compress it, but those methods actually don’t work that well for blocks of solid colors since they were invented to compress photos.
Mario Bros has only a few colors on the screen rather than specifying each dot with enough information to represent 16 million colors, they can give each dot a much smaller number. They also don’t have to store data for a whole screen worth. They say, here is the data for what Mario should look like. Here’s what each koopa should look like and there are three koopas on the screen. Here’s what a coin looks like, there are 8 coins on the screen. Etc.
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