4 ms·
It seems tangential, but interesting, that a system that provided my childhood years with probably thousands of hours of entertainment did so with individual ga
by evancoop 5y ago
It seems tangential, but interesting, that a system that provided my childhood years with probably thousands of hours of entertainment did so with individual games requiring less memory than the average corporate spreadsheet.
Has anyone attempted to calculate utility per byte? Certainly, the relative evolution of society would play a role (a cave-dweller might have found a few hieroglyphs entirely fascinating), but even with a certain adjustment factor in terms of the general complexity of dominant sources of information, Nintendo games would assuredly excel.
As evidence, folks are still speed-running the original Super Mario Bros from 1985. Lindy effect or efficiency of "utility" per byte?
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoI expect a plain text file would win the utility per byte award.
- evancoop 5y agoPossibly, but I doubt that 35-years later, folks would continue to read and re-read that .txt file for its entertainment value. Those few hundred thousand bytes of Mario Bros. code have been reviewed by so many for so long!
- LocalH 5y agoTry 32,768 bytes (plus 8,192 bytes of graphics data).