N64 game size

[RCBH928]

I was over at UG and looking at the sizes of N64 games, while I was amazed that snes games are only like 4mb, I considered the time of release and technology back then. But what is really amazing is how can an N64 game with 3D models, 3d levels, music, and all that be only like 10-20 mb?!
I looked over at psx games and they were more like 400-600 mb. Now I do not recall psx having surprisingly better graphics, I know it can handle CD quality audio and video though, but how can they squeeze Mario or Zelda or whateve into a 20 mb game?!

Today , the intro image to any game is like 20 mb.
Any one find this to be very amazing?!

[superlarz]

Major compression, blurries, limited music and no FMV(well mostly). These are the reasons. It is definitely amazing that they got Resident Evil 2 on N64.

[Ziggy]

Yeah, I bet the FMV of those PS1 games took up more space than the rest of the game. There was probably very limited compression methods back then.

[ThunderPrince]

and the cd quality audio probably ate up most of the space. I know with Saturn games the audio takes up like 3/5 of the disc space.

[t0yrobo]

If you actually try games can be made really really small, there's been indie game contest for games that are only kilobites, and a game like Ikaruga is only something like 30mb. Having gobs of space not only lets devs use things like uncompressed audio and massive videos, but it lets them be generally sloppy.

[Mozgus]

Go into any disk image for a PS1/Saturn game, and highlight everything that isn't streaming video or audio, and you'll usually end up with 5-25MB of files. Streaming media simply takes more space. Of course, games like Final Fantasy 7-9 and Resident Evil use prerendered backgrounds, and those can add up to 100-200MB in space, especially if they have any animation in them.

But games like Vagrant Story, which is some of the most advanced 3D and animation the PS1 has ever seen, is an 80 MB image, and thats including an FMV intro and a couple streamed audio tracks. It's probably 20MB without those, and in my opinion, it trumps the graphics of any N64 game.

[Hatta]

I'd sure like to see another cartridge based system. Think of what they could do with these giant chips and miniscule loading times.

[MrPopo]

I'd sure like to see another cartridge based system. Think of what they could do with these giant chips and miniscule loading times.

So you mean a DS but a console and using fullsize carts?

[marurun]

Keep in mind that the N64's texture cache was only 4K, 2K with mip-mapping. That meant every texture had to be very small, especially if there were a lot in a scene. That's why so many games used various shading techniques like garoud shading. It could load more textures off the cartridge, possibly store them in RAM and dump them to the texture cache when needed, but the textures still had to be tiny, really. Even the Saturn didn't have a limitation like that.

So yeah, most N64 games had much less graphics data, likely.

[Ziggy]

It was one of the "down falls" of the N64 actually. Many people said the choice to stick with cartridges was a bad one, but I think it was still a solid system. Perhaps if Nintendo chose to use CDs the Final Fantasy series would still be on Nintendo systems. But, oh well.