Game Size

[Jrecee]

so the rom is larger or smaller than the original game?

Comparing 2D with 3D games is very misleading, because with sprites you can more easily use repetition. Frequently with textures you need a lot more textures for a given class of object because different varients (different shapes of rocks) need different textures to look good. Early 3D games didn't even use textures a lot of the time; instead they'd just use shading. A good example is Mario 64; most of the game is done just using shading and gradients instead of textures, which saves a ton of space.

Or just stretching a texture over half the level and blurring the shit out of it. That's the nintendo 64 way.

[neilencio]

The n64 also used proprietary data compression in a lot of games to compensate for the limited cart space (IIRC, the FMVs in Resident Evil 2 were compressed). I forgot which emulator documentation I read it in, but it was said that the console was able to reach 8:1 compression ratio. Which explains why the ROM files were significantly smaller than the CD-based counterparts.

They also used a lot of other tricks to reduce the filesize, like the gimped soundtrack on Tony Hawk, or Mortal Kombat 4's cutscenes being rendered using the in-game engine instead of using an FMV (in game cutscenes being smaller, since they only rely on scripts, with in-game resources being used instead of a separate video file)

[scarper]

Shantae is only 4 mb. And that game is ripe with content. The Game Boy used alien technology: SNES and PS1 games were put through a modified shrinky-dink, causing ALL the data to fit inside little black boxes. Then Nintendo took those, and glued them on the games.

They didn't have to this with NES games, since those cartridges were already small enough. Seriously though, most of those games took up about a third of that hollow plastic void inside the cartridges.

[BRIK]

I don't know if its just me, but 700mb sounds pretty damn reasonable for a new game these days.

[J T]

Having a bunch of different clouds that move and look realistic in the sky takes a lot more space for data than the same little 3 color cloud repeated over and over in the sky in SMB.

And repeated again in the bushes!

[D.D.D.]

Having a bunch of different clouds that move and look realistic in the sky takes a lot more space for data than the same little 3 color cloud repeated over and over in the sky in SMB.

And repeated again in the bushes!

The first time I noticed that it blew my mind.

[BoringSupreez]

Having a bunch of different clouds that move and look realistic in the sky takes a lot more space for data than the same little 3 color cloud repeated over and over in the sky in SMB.

And repeated again in the bushes!

The first time I noticed that it blew my mind.

It's like when you when you first realize that the "abc" song is just "twinkle twinkle little star" with different words.

[AppleQueso]

It's like when you when you first realize that the "abc" song is just "twinkle twinkle little star" with different words.

I mentioned this to a guy a few years ago at school, and he was completely awestruck by the revelation. It became something of an obsession for him for a good month or so.

[CRTGAMER]

Having a bunch of different clouds that move and look realistic in the sky takes a lot more space for data than the same little 3 color cloud repeated over and over in the sky in SMB.

And repeated again in the bushes!

The first time I noticed that it blew my mind.

I never noticed that until now.

What went wrong? Does developers not care about size any more? I mean we still have bandwidth limit, and our devices are limited too(iphone+ipad=64Gb max!) also early xbox is 20GB. Wii has none I think...

Well, the games are a lot more powerful today, but agree developers have so much room now that tight space saving coding is no longer an issue. Think what the coders did in the Atari 2600 days with very limited memory space.

[o.pwuaioc]

And this: http://frontline.gamerlimit.com/2010/04 ... your-mind/