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 original Super Mario Bros game was more of a set of instructions to the computers inside the video game console of how to produce the graphics of the game. These had to be very simple instructions because back then you didn’t have a lot of space to program the game in. Your codes had to be very precise and simple.
A JPEG is likewise a set of instructions to a computer, but it’s a more complicated form of instructions. It’s designed to handle very elaborate images, so even if you take a picture of something very simple looking, the code that describes that image for a JPEG is more complicated and long.
It’s sort of the difference between telling a computer “put red dot in 5,45” and “in the intersection of the fifth row, and the 45th column, place one pixel that is this specific shade of crimson.” Using the second set of instructions, you theoretically can produce a lot more complex artwork. But even if you’re using that to just make a simple image, it’s going to be a lot longer than the sort of programming used in the original Nintendo.
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