6 ms·

Super Mario Bros. game was just 31 Kilobytes. How's that possible?

116 points by rahuldottech 7y ago

ekianjo 7y ago
> They can cram 30minutes of an entire 3d shooter into 64kb because they understand and know so much more about their data. Erm, not really. Most of the time it's because they spend like 3 minutes of loading time generating textures and all in memory before displaying anything on screen. And they rely on the giganormous graphic libraries of Windows (for Windows demos) + the huge driver stack that would never fit in 64kb in the first place. I am much more impressed by demos built to run on "the hardware" back in C64 and Amiga days.
- jesuschroist 7y ago
  > they spend like 3 minutes of loading time generating textures this implies that they do 'know so much more about their data' than a simple bitmap
  - justinjlynn 7y ago
    Would you rather have to know about your data in such detail that you can define a general function for generating it... or just define it?
- illys 7y ago
  About the driver stack that would never fit: When you have a single hardware (C64, Amiga...), it is not more complex to address than addressing drivers. Peeking/poking ports and directly addressing video memory is not much costly in bytes.
  - mumblemumble 7y ago
    I think, though, that this is why, back in the '90s, there was so much hand-wringing about recent developments (at the time) in computing leading to the spiritual death of the demoscene. All that hardware heterogeneity meant that democoders end up far removed from the machines they work on. It's turned out to be at least somewhat true, insofar as oldschool demos still carry a lot of cachet despite the hardware not being anywhere near as capable. I don't know which one took more effort or skill to build, but, on a gut level, 8088MPH just feels cooler than kkrieger. Maybe that's just me showing my age, though.
    - badsectoracula 7y ago
      Considering they had to write custom tools for pretty much everything, including a visual language and editor to design all art assets almost two decades before that became a thing in AAA games and create custom compression schemes down even -IIRC- custom floating point representation that would compress better, i'd say that .kkrieger was the one that took more effort and skill. (though a lot of that work was largely based on their initial work for .the .product). 8088MPH is certainly very cool, but a large reason is that nobody had bothered with the original IBM PC much before.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  let me show you my one byte compressor, it only relies on a 1TB data set
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
jbverschoor 7y ago
Just clever use of tiles, proper encoding of assets, and making you code lean. Back in the '00s, I made a j2me mobile realtime multiplayer online strategy game, which included animations, music and sfx. It was 60kb, because I wanted to target as many devices as possible. Later it grew till about 200kb Lots of space and performance optimizations.
- exikyut 7y ago
  What game was this? (Can I find JARs anywhere?)
pubby 7y ago
Wow as someone who knows the NES well this article contains an error in almost every paragraph. They really got all the technical stuff wrong! So many made-up numbers everywhere! To explain Super Mario a bit better, it's really not using many tricks. The graphics are uncompressed and take up 8KB. The code is uncompressed. The only thing really compressed is the levels. The explosion in video game size from then to now is because asset detail grows O(N^2) - if you double the detail of a texture you end up squaring the size.
- jorvi 7y ago
  Developers are also just lazy or plain believe in snake oil. On PC, Titanfall 1 had uncompressed wav files for audio which was 35GB of its 48GB file size, the reason being 'decoding audio incurs a performance cost and we want the maximum performance for our players'. Not only is using lossless audio unnecessary (no in the world is gonna hear the difference between a wav/flac or 320kbps mp3 gunshot), the decoding cost for mp3 or ogg is miniscule.
  - ASalazarMX 7y ago
    I guess reading and processing 10x the data had better performance.
  - asdff 7y ago
    That is just brutally asinine. Probably one guy in the whole dev team believed this load of crock and the rest of the team had to follow him off the cliff because he had a senior title.
GlitchMr 7y ago
No, no, no. 1. Super Mario Bros. is 40KB (PRG ROM is 32KB, and CHR ROM is 8KB). That said, I suppose if you were to compress the ROM, you probably would end up with value like 31KB. 2. Levels don't use RLE or LZ77, that would use too much space. Rather, the game uses commands like "from now on, use this ground fill pattern", "draw pipe here", "put a staircase", "put a goal". Super Mario Bros. uses two bytes per object, representing the following information: XXXXYYYY PSSSVVVV, where X is horizontal position within the page, Y is vertical position within the page, P moves to the next page, S is a command, and V is its parameter (length or number of an extended object). Y positions bigger than 0b1011 are used for special commands (as such parameters would be rendered out of bounds). 3. Graphics aren't compressed as they are stored in CHR ROM, and are directly accessed by the PPU (PPU cannot access RAM). However, as the graphics are 2bpp, they don't use as much space. Palettes are used to not restrict the entire game to 2bpp - note that 16x16 blocks have different color palettes. Some tricks are used to reduce the number of necessary tiles - for instance, clouds are the same thing as bushes, just with a different palette applied. 4. Demoscene is misleading. The way demoscene works is that most things are using procedural generation, meanwhile the levels in Super Mario Bros. are actually designed, and graphics were drawn by an artist, they aren't using some arbitrarily picked mathematical function chosen because it looked cool. The game has to be playable after all.
- coldpie 7y ago
  Indeed, nothing in this article has anything to do with how the NES worked. If you want a real introduction to the hardware, "I Am Error" by Nathan Altice is a great book about how the NES worked. It includes a chapter about how SMB1 in particular stored its level layouts.
  - eutropia 7y ago
    I once did a project scripting AI for Mario on SMB1 on an emulator, and I watched the game's memory pages as I did so I could learn more. To my surprise, I saw the pages of arrays of hex bytes in the memory mirroring what I saw on the level, the layout was very literally transferred directly. When Mario moved, the current screen and the next one were clearly visible scrolling by in memory, which different hex bytes representing different tile types.
falcor84 7y ago
My reading enjoyment was really harmed by the indiscriminate occasional lower-casing of the units. According to the notation I was taught, 1MB is 1 megabyte, while 1mb is 1 mili-bit - a fractional unit (used really rarely in information theory) that is 8 billion times smaller. Note: I think you can actually talk about fractional bits in information through
propter_hoc 7y ago
> "Basically, we’re sending more data to smaller devices simply due to screen resolution. Which, for the next 2 billion folks in emerging markets, on 2G connections, is like the worst idea ever. But I digress. That’s a different post." I'll take the devil's advocate position on this tangent. Mobile data infrastructure is remarkably reliable and cost-effective in emerging markets. Anecdotally, I live in Canada. We have some of the most expensive and restrictive mobile phone service in the world. 4G coverage is still spotty, even in major cities. On a recent trip to Morocco it was really astounding to me how much cheaper, faster and more ubiquitous 4G service was. Here is some actual data: [0] Global pricing of 1GB of data: https://www.cable.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide-data-pricing/ https://www.cable.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide-data-pricing/ [1] Mobile data speeds by country: https://www.opensignal.com/reports/2018/11/global-state-of-the-mobile-network https://www.opensignal.com/reports/2018/11/global-state-of-t...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
jkoudys 7y ago
Great write-up! Pondering this question is the thing that brought my into software development in the first place. It was fascinating back then how my big, expensive, PC/XT would struggle to make anything run half as smoothly as a Game Boy. PC games with contents spread over several floppy disks, taking MEGABYTES of space and slowly crunch-crunch-crunching whenever I'd go to a different screen in Quest for Glory, but you could play in the immersive game of Zelda seamlessly. It's good to look back and appreciate the fundamentals, since there was a lot of clever thinking in this we can learn from today. There are often times I'll come up with an overly hefty solution in a generic case, instead of thinking like Nintendo did about focusing on making something cool to look at with a fun experience, though with a much narrower scope. NLP is one place I see this a lot - it's often very easy to make aws happy when I go through GBs of data, for something where 95% of the value to the end user could be reached with a 50kB file on the S3. Dapps are another one - helps a lot to think like a Nintendo dev in the 80s about what the reusable parts of your data are.
- lilSebastian 7y ago
  > Great write-up! It's an awful post, it would take less time to point out what is correct than highlight all the mistakes.
duckqlz 7y ago
Super off topic but.... > Which, for the next 2 billion folks in emerging markets, on 2G connections, is like the worst idea ever. Which emerging markets still use 2G? In almost all of the world 2G is being phased out and it’s in developed economies where it is scheduled to take the longest. Many emerging markets had their infrastructure created after 2G was obsolete and are already on better technology. https://www.emnify.com/blog/global-2g-phase-out https://www.emnify.com/blog/global-2g-phase-out
- qeternity 7y ago
  This article gets so many things wrong it’s painful.
- Davidbrcz 7y ago
  I know that some hub/station on which remote sensors to monitor cows' temperature communicate with a web server with a 2G technology as they were designed many years ago. And it's an issue as operators phase out 2D...
nathell 7y ago
.kkrieger wasn't 64K, it was 96K.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Mathiasb17 7y ago
It's unlikely that the final image displayed is 180kb for a 256 * 240 resolution, this would imply that the color uses 3 bytes (RGB). i think it's coded in one byte (256 colors). So i'd say the final image would be 60 kbytes. Can someone confirm ?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
conductr 7y ago
I prefer the inverse of this question. Something like... Why is the iOS Uber app taking up 250mb on my phone?
- rafaelvasco 7y ago
  Wow. Really ? Thats like, really bloated;
  - conductr 7y ago
    Yep. To be fair, it’s 211 app and 39 docs and data which I assume is a map cache Facebook is 235 app size. These are both basically just clients for backend Rest, seems crazy at this size
- lilSebastian 7y ago
  Terrible developers, poor framework and design choices.
mrfusion 7y ago
This was also on reddit today: https://pay.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/dfv6n3/let_that_sink_in/ https://pay.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/dfv6n3/l... Interesting that a single screenshot of the game weighs more than the entire game.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  That is because they didn't try, this screenshot[0] is 1980 bytes which is much smaller than the linked image (and something like OptiPNG might make it even smaller) :-P [0] https://i.imgur.com/ABFJbYW.png https://i.imgur.com/ABFJbYW.png
ramon 7y ago
This article shows how the author has a vision about developing nations still working on 2G and SNES to web game development as almost being the same. Back then people didn't even talk about RAM but ROM so it's a totally different scenario, and about the 2G maybe you think South Korea is a developing country too well they're the first ones with the 5G technology in the world implemented at comercial scale.
zackkatz 7y ago
This article is from 2015. The title should reflect that.
EA 7y ago
Ask HN: I wonder what the fewest lines of code that have earned the most revenue is...
jpalomaki 7y ago
Very good talk by David Braben about the original Elite where he describes tricks they used to cut the size: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmorte...

116 points by rahuldottech 7y ago

> They can cram 30minutes of an entire 3d shooter into 64kb because they understand and know so much more about their data. Erm, not really. Most of the time it's because they spend like 3 minutes of loading time generating textures and all in memory before displaying anything on screen. And they rely on the giganormous graphic libraries of Windows (for Windows demos) + the huge driver stack that would never fit in 64kb in the first place. I am much more impressed by demos built to run on "the hardware" back in C64 and Amiga days.

jesuschroist 7y ago
> they spend like 3 minutes of loading time generating textures this implies that they do 'know so much more about their data' than a simple bitmap
- justinjlynn 7y ago
  Would you rather have to know about your data in such detail that you can define a general function for generating it... or just define it?
illys 7y ago
About the driver stack that would never fit: When you have a single hardware (C64, Amiga...), it is not more complex to address than addressing drivers. Peeking/poking ports and directly addressing video memory is not much costly in bytes.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  I think, though, that this is why, back in the '90s, there was so much hand-wringing about recent developments (at the time) in computing leading to the spiritual death of the demoscene. All that hardware heterogeneity meant that democoders end up far removed from the machines they work on. It's turned out to be at least somewhat true, insofar as oldschool demos still carry a lot of cachet despite the hardware not being anywhere near as capable. I don't know which one took more effort or skill to build, but, on a gut level, 8088MPH just feels cooler than kkrieger. Maybe that's just me showing my age, though.
  - badsectoracula 7y ago
    Considering they had to write custom tools for pretty much everything, including a visual language and editor to design all art assets almost two decades before that became a thing in AAA games and create custom compression schemes down even -IIRC- custom floating point representation that would compress better, i'd say that .kkrieger was the one that took more effort and skill. (though a lot of that work was largely based on their initial work for .the .product). 8088MPH is certainly very cool, but a large reason is that nobody had bothered with the original IBM PC much before.
agumonkey 7y ago
let me show you my one byte compressor, it only relies on a 1TB data set
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

jbverschoor 7y ago

Just clever use of tiles, proper encoding of assets, and making you code lean. Back in the '00s, I made a j2me mobile realtime multiplayer online strategy game, which included animations, music and sfx. It was 60kb, because I wanted to target as many devices as possible. Later it grew till about 200kb Lots of space and performance optimizations.

exikyut 7y ago
What game was this? (Can I find JARs anywhere?)

pubby 7y ago

Wow as someone who knows the NES well this article contains an error in almost every paragraph. They really got all the technical stuff wrong! So many made-up numbers everywhere! To explain Super Mario a bit better, it's really not using many tricks. The graphics are uncompressed and take up 8KB. The code is uncompressed. The only thing really compressed is the levels. The explosion in video game size from then to now is because asset detail grows O(N^2) - if you double the detail of a texture you end up squaring the size.

jorvi 7y ago
Developers are also just lazy or plain believe in snake oil. On PC, Titanfall 1 had uncompressed wav files for audio which was 35GB of its 48GB file size, the reason being 'decoding audio incurs a performance cost and we want the maximum performance for our players'. Not only is using lossless audio unnecessary (no in the world is gonna hear the difference between a wav/flac or 320kbps mp3 gunshot), the decoding cost for mp3 or ogg is miniscule.
- ASalazarMX 7y ago
  I guess reading and processing 10x the data had better performance.
- asdff 7y ago
  That is just brutally asinine. Probably one guy in the whole dev team believed this load of crock and the rest of the team had to follow him off the cliff because he had a senior title.

GlitchMr 7y ago

No, no, no. 1. Super Mario Bros. is 40KB (PRG ROM is 32KB, and CHR ROM is 8KB). That said, I suppose if you were to compress the ROM, you probably would end up with value like 31KB. 2. Levels don't use RLE or LZ77, that would use too much space. Rather, the game uses commands like "from now on, use this ground fill pattern", "draw pipe here", "put a staircase", "put a goal". Super Mario Bros. uses two bytes per object, representing the following information: XXXXYYYY PSSSVVVV, where X is horizontal position within the page, Y is vertical position within the page, P moves to the next page, S is a command, and V is its parameter (length or number of an extended object). Y positions bigger than 0b1011 are used for special commands (as such parameters would be rendered out of bounds). 3. Graphics aren't compressed as they are stored in CHR ROM, and are directly accessed by the PPU (PPU cannot access RAM). However, as the graphics are 2bpp, they don't use as much space. Palettes are used to not restrict the entire game to 2bpp - note that 16x16 blocks have different color palettes. Some tricks are used to reduce the number of necessary tiles - for instance, clouds are the same thing as bushes, just with a different palette applied. 4. Demoscene is misleading. The way demoscene works is that most things are using procedural generation, meanwhile the levels in Super Mario Bros. are actually designed, and graphics were drawn by an artist, they aren't using some arbitrarily picked mathematical function chosen because it looked cool. The game has to be playable after all.

coldpie 7y ago
Indeed, nothing in this article has anything to do with how the NES worked. If you want a real introduction to the hardware, "I Am Error" by Nathan Altice is a great book about how the NES worked. It includes a chapter about how SMB1 in particular stored its level layouts.
- eutropia 7y ago
  I once did a project scripting AI for Mario on SMB1 on an emulator, and I watched the game's memory pages as I did so I could learn more. To my surprise, I saw the pages of arrays of hex bytes in the memory mirroring what I saw on the level, the layout was very literally transferred directly. When Mario moved, the current screen and the next one were clearly visible scrolling by in memory, which different hex bytes representing different tile types.

falcor84 7y ago

My reading enjoyment was really harmed by the indiscriminate occasional lower-casing of the units. According to the notation I was taught, 1MB is 1 megabyte, while 1mb is 1 mili-bit - a fractional unit (used really rarely in information theory) that is 8 billion times smaller. Note: I think you can actually talk about fractional bits in information through

propter_hoc 7y ago

> "Basically, we’re sending more data to smaller devices simply due to screen resolution. Which, for the next 2 billion folks in emerging markets, on 2G connections, is like the worst idea ever. But I digress. That’s a different post." I'll take the devil's advocate position on this tangent. Mobile data infrastructure is remarkably reliable and cost-effective in emerging markets. Anecdotally, I live in Canada. We have some of the most expensive and restrictive mobile phone service in the world. 4G coverage is still spotty, even in major cities. On a recent trip to Morocco it was really astounding to me how much cheaper, faster and more ubiquitous 4G service was. Here is some actual data: [0] Global pricing of 1GB of data: https://www.cable.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide-data-pricing/ https://www.cable.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide-data-pricing/ [1] Mobile data speeds by country: https://www.opensignal.com/reports/2018/11/global-state-of-the-mobile-network https://www.opensignal.com/reports/2018/11/global-state-of-t...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

jkoudys 7y ago

Great write-up! Pondering this question is the thing that brought my into software development in the first place. It was fascinating back then how my big, expensive, PC/XT would struggle to make anything run half as smoothly as a Game Boy. PC games with contents spread over several floppy disks, taking MEGABYTES of space and slowly crunch-crunch-crunching whenever I'd go to a different screen in Quest for Glory, but you could play in the immersive game of Zelda seamlessly. It's good to look back and appreciate the fundamentals, since there was a lot of clever thinking in this we can learn from today. There are often times I'll come up with an overly hefty solution in a generic case, instead of thinking like Nintendo did about focusing on making something cool to look at with a fun experience, though with a much narrower scope. NLP is one place I see this a lot - it's often very easy to make aws happy when I go through GBs of data, for something where 95% of the value to the end user could be reached with a 50kB file on the S3. Dapps are another one - helps a lot to think like a Nintendo dev in the 80s about what the reusable parts of your data are.

lilSebastian 7y ago
> Great write-up! It's an awful post, it would take less time to point out what is correct than highlight all the mistakes.

duckqlz 7y ago

Super off topic but.... > Which, for the next 2 billion folks in emerging markets, on 2G connections, is like the worst idea ever. Which emerging markets still use 2G? In almost all of the world 2G is being phased out and it’s in developed economies where it is scheduled to take the longest. Many emerging markets had their infrastructure created after 2G was obsolete and are already on better technology. https://www.emnify.com/blog/global-2g-phase-out https://www.emnify.com/blog/global-2g-phase-out

qeternity 7y ago
This article gets so many things wrong it’s painful.
Davidbrcz 7y ago
I know that some hub/station on which remote sensors to monitor cows' temperature communicate with a web server with a 2G technology as they were designed many years ago. And it's an issue as operators phase out 2D...

nathell 7y ago

.kkrieger wasn't 64K, it was 96K.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Mathiasb17 7y ago

It's unlikely that the final image displayed is 180kb for a 256 * 240 resolution, this would imply that the color uses 3 bytes (RGB). i think it's coded in one byte (256 colors). So i'd say the final image would be 60 kbytes. Can someone confirm ?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

conductr 7y ago

I prefer the inverse of this question. Something like... Why is the iOS Uber app taking up 250mb on my phone?

rafaelvasco 7y ago
Wow. Really ? Thats like, really bloated;
- conductr 7y ago
  Yep. To be fair, it’s 211 app and 39 docs and data which I assume is a map cache Facebook is 235 app size. These are both basically just clients for backend Rest, seems crazy at this size
lilSebastian 7y ago
Terrible developers, poor framework and design choices.

mrfusion 7y ago

This was also on reddit today: https://pay.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/dfv6n3/let_that_sink_in/ https://pay.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/dfv6n3/l... Interesting that a single screenshot of the game weighs more than the entire game.

badsectoracula 7y ago
That is because they didn't try, this screenshot[0] is 1980 bytes which is much smaller than the linked image (and something like OptiPNG might make it even smaller) :-P [0] https://i.imgur.com/ABFJbYW.png https://i.imgur.com/ABFJbYW.png

ramon 7y ago

This article shows how the author has a vision about developing nations still working on 2G and SNES to web game development as almost being the same. Back then people didn't even talk about RAM but ROM so it's a totally different scenario, and about the 2G maybe you think South Korea is a developing country too well they're the first ones with the 5G technology in the world implemented at comercial scale.

zackkatz 7y ago

This article is from 2015. The title should reflect that.

EA 7y ago

Ask HN: I wonder what the fewest lines of code that have earned the most revenue is...

jpalomaki 7y ago

Very good talk by David Braben about the original Elite where he describes tricks they used to cut the size: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmorte...