3 ms·
Zelda 1 was 128 kB, for those wondering, and that's without any compression. Double that for the sequel.
by jsheard 9mo ago
Zelda 1 was 128 kB, for those wondering, and that's without any compression. Double that for the sequel.
- Andrex 9mo agoThat honestly doesn't seem too bad. Zelda 1 is relatively large but it reuses a lot of assets and honestly probably doesn't have that much text. (More than a Mario but way less than a Dragon Warrior.)
- whaleofatw2022 9mo agoAFAIR tho im not sure its even 128k, I think disk cards themselves are more like 110k and even then FDS Zelda had separate sides mostly for main menu and saves. IOW might have been able to fit in 96Kb or less.
- rlv-dan 9mo ago> without any compression Perhaps not compression as we see it today. But one could argue that tile based graphics and code based music is a form of compression. Old games used a myriad of cool tricks to get around their limitations.
- 6510 9mo agoModern coders will probably never experience the fun of rewriting the same thing endlessly only to discover how good some early version really was. Then some time after giving up someone else would make a similar thing go 20 times faster.
- 6510 9mo agoModern coders will most likely never get to enjoy endless rewrites.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Drakim 9mo agoZelda 1 has TONS of built-in compression, and it's own decompression routines.
- jsheard 9mo agoI should have worded that better, I meant no UPX-style end-to-end compression like the OPs project used. NES games had to be much more judicious than that since there wasn't nearly enough RAM to decompress everything at once.
- throwawee 9mo agoYep. Each screen is just a list of prebuilt columns reused over and over. Then they used a form of crude RLE on the lists.