5 ms·

I’m always amazed at old nintendo and Gameboy games. I believe the first Pokémon was 512k!

Ekaros 5y ago
512KB sounds pretty reasonable consider how simple the graphics and gameplay actually is. 90s really were much more efficient time. Nowadays we consider nothing of half-a-meg useless images or javascript libraries...
- flatiron 5y ago
  I disagree. They took a bunch of time to compress the story and characters into that size. It was a triumph. Not close to “reasonable”
- Macha 5y ago
  A typical PNG screenshot of many classic games is often larger than the game it's taking a screenshot of. Sure, you can save a lot of space building a custom simple indexed palette loader and using some sort of 2bpp format, compared to the standard 32bit ARGB PNG format, but is it worth the dev time cost?
  - kd5bjo 5y ago
    PNG supports an indexed-palette mode natively, so there’s no need to write a custom loader. cf. http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/book/chapter08.html#png.ch08.div.5.1 http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/book/chapter08.html#png.ch08.d...
TylerE 5y ago
The really amazing one to me is Donkey Kong Country. 40 levels? Most with unique FULL color pre-rendered graphics, and the whole game is 4MB
- edgyquant 5y ago
  And Ocarina of Time is like 30mb. That’s a lot more than 4 but considering it’s a full fledged 3D game with 9 dungeons and a semi-open world (with two states, an adult and child one) it seems crazy considering games are like 100gb these days.
chongli 5y ago
That’s nothing! The original Super Mario Bros was 40k! What allows these old games to be super small is that they’re 8-bit and use sprite, tiles, and tile maps; and palettes for everything. Almost everything was done in hardware so you didn’t need to implement a renderer in software, you just poked bytes in various places and stuff happened. Even the loading data was handled by DMA.
- flatiron 5y ago
  Mario and Pokémon are in different leagues. Text takes up room.

512KB sounds pretty reasonable consider how simple the graphics and gameplay actually is. 90s really were much more efficient time. Nowadays we consider nothing of half-a-meg useless images or javascript libraries...

flatiron 5y ago
I disagree. They took a bunch of time to compress the story and characters into that size. It was a triumph. Not close to “reasonable”
Macha 5y ago
A typical PNG screenshot of many classic games is often larger than the game it's taking a screenshot of. Sure, you can save a lot of space building a custom simple indexed palette loader and using some sort of 2bpp format, compared to the standard 32bit ARGB PNG format, but is it worth the dev time cost?
- kd5bjo 5y ago
  PNG supports an indexed-palette mode natively, so there’s no need to write a custom loader. cf. http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/book/chapter08.html#png.ch08.div.5.1 http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/book/chapter08.html#png.ch08.d...

TylerE 5y ago

The really amazing one to me is Donkey Kong Country. 40 levels? Most with unique FULL color pre-rendered graphics, and the whole game is 4MB

edgyquant 5y ago
And Ocarina of Time is like 30mb. That’s a lot more than 4 but considering it’s a full fledged 3D game with 9 dungeons and a semi-open world (with two states, an adult and child one) it seems crazy considering games are like 100gb these days.

chongli 5y ago

That’s nothing! The original Super Mario Bros was 40k! What allows these old games to be super small is that they’re 8-bit and use sprite, tiles, and tile maps; and palettes for everything. Almost everything was done in hardware so you didn’t need to implement a renderer in software, you just poked bytes in various places and stuff happened. Even the loading data was handled by DMA.

flatiron 5y ago
Mario and Pokémon are in different leagues. Text takes up room.