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>40,000 bytes for all code and data. Wow. That sounds impressive, but it really isn't that much, because it's text-only. If you want to see something truly im
by magduf 8y ago
>40,000 bytes for all code and data. Wow.
That sounds impressive, but it really isn't that much, because it's text-only.
If you want to see something truly impressive, look at Super Mario Bros. on the NES: the entire game is about 64k! Most of the NES games were on that order of size, and they were graphical real-time games.
Also, I'm pretty sure that you'll find with these text-adventure games that they compress quite readily down to a fraction of the size you stated. NES games, not so much. ASCII text isn't a terribly efficient medium of storage, and they didn't have much if any data compression in those days.
- duskwuff 8y ago> I'm pretty sure that you'll find with these text-adventure games that they compress quite readily down to a fraction of the size you stated. You might be surprised. Infocom games don't store text as ASCII; they use a more compact format [1] which packs three characters into every two bytes, and allows for "abbreviations" of commonly used text fragments. Obviously it's nothing like a modern compressor, but still surprisingly effective. I tested GZIP and XZ against a sample of 19 vintage Infocom games. GZIP only managed to compress them by 30%; XZ did a little better at 40%, but still nowhere near what you'd expect for text (70-80%). [1]: https://www.inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point0/sect03.html https://www.inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point0/s...
- magduf 8y agoVery interesting, and better than I would have expected (as in, that's a lower compression rate than I would have expected). I wonder how gzip and xz do with Super Mario Bros. and other NES games though.