How many megabits?????

Post by **bennythejet** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 12:12 pm

I remember when i was growing up that most SNES games were between 4 - 16 megabits and Neo Geo games were anything from say, 34 - 700! Does anyone know the average size of a game now in 'megabittage'?

Post by **mrgoodbytes** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 12:43 pm

8megaBITS = 1 megaBYTE

you do the math

Post by **Funk, E** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 12:44 pm

Well, it's pretty simple math. A gigabyte is 8192 megabits, so we'll multiply your average DVD size--4.2GB, I think? by 8192. Works out to 34406.4 megabits for your average DVD game. Double that for a dual-layer game. Of course, that's only if a game fills up a whole DVD.

Post by **bennythejet** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 1:23 pm

Just imagine then, if games developers/programmers had this amount of memory available to them all those years ago, how much greater the (already great) games would have been!!! Goes to show that all this extra space for games doesn't guarantee they'll be any good! I just sold my PS3 and got a Neo Geo and i couldn't be happier!

Post by **JJJ** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 1:44 pm

I remember when CD games first came out. I read with a sense of wonder the vast amounts of data they could hold - and how the Turbo Duo was the first console to harness this space. In truth, the developers of the era had a damn hard time filling up CDs with anything useful. CD soundtracks, bloated cutscenes and intros were about all they could come up with. The actual 'game' portion of the disc was usually very small, and would have fit on a cartridge/gamecard easily.

So fast forward to today's gaming era. I was thinking of buying Lost Odyssey for 360. *4 DL-DVDs!* Thats about 34000mb, or about 272000 Megabits!

Website · Post by **Lodestar** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 11:55 pm

@JJJ:

But then you have instances where the cartridge was just not enough. Take Secret of Mana, for example.
The game would have featured a lot of extra sprites (including more attack animations and visible weapon changes for all of the various upgrades), but the SNES cartridge didn't hold nearly enough space to contain all of that. Among other things, the game was supposed to have more orbs and areas as well.

Also, towards the thread starter...why would you sell your PS3 for a Neo Geo? Don't get me wrong, the Neo Geo has some excellent games (Garou!), but the real fun is playing them with other people.

Post by **JJJ** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 1:02 am

Sure, there are games like that out there. The trouble is, the odds were heavily against any early CD games like that being made. Developers were too enthralled with the multimedia capabilities of CDs to imagine just making a 'bigger cartridge game' with them. And consumers were part of the problem as they expected the whole multimedia extravaganza as part of the CD-ROM experience.

Lodestar wrote:@JJJ:

But then you have instances where the cartridge was just not enough. Take Secret of Mana, for example.
The game would have featured a lot of extra sprites (including more attack animations and visible weapon changes for all of the various upgrades), but the SNES cartridge didn't hold nearly enough space to contain all of that. Among other things, the game was supposed to have more orbs and areas as well.

Also, towards the thread starter...why would you sell your PS3 for a Neo Geo? Don't get me wrong, the Neo Geo has some excellent games (Garou!), but the real fun is playing them with other people.

Post by **D.D.D.** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 11:01 am

Lodestar wrote:@JJJ:

But then you have instances where the cartridge was just not enough. Take Secret of Mana, for example.
The game would have featured a lot of extra sprites (including more attack animations and visible weapon changes for all of the various upgrades), but the SNES cartridge didn't hold nearly enough space to contain all of that. Among other things, the game was supposed to have more orbs and areas as well.

Also, towards the thread starter...why would you sell your PS3 for a Neo Geo? Don't get me wrong, the Neo Geo has some excellent games (Garou!), but the real fun is playing them with other people.

It's not just that "the cartridge was just not enough" but rather in those days, memory was a lot more expensive and to keep the cost of the game down they skimped on certain things like frames and reusing sprites etc. They could do it all on a cart but cost-wise they usually didn't. There was more than one reason Neo carts were expensive~

And even if some Turbo CD games could be on a cart, I didn't need the cut scenes really but, those soundtracks were just damn awesome.

Post by **nightwalker** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 11:54 am

This is to confusing

I'm gonna go play now.....

Post by **bennythejet** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 12:37 pm

In reply to Lodestar. I had a JAP PS3 for a year. The best thing about it is the backwards compatibility with PS2 games. Most of the new games that come out for it are worthless first-person shooters that do absolutely nothing for me. I know that developers have to cater for the majority to get a good return on their games but sadly this is primarily for the current generation of 'kids'. My decision to get an MVS Neo Geo was based on not much spare time to play games so the need for quick arcadey games was a must. Plus i could never afford one as a kid but now i can