>they managed to pack entire games onto these things, some of which were over 20 hours long, with unlockable features, new game plus mechanics, communication abilities with other games, and moreLiterally how?
it's 20 hours of slowly walking around on a jpeg, not hd 4k video footage
>>12177615the entirety of super mario bros is less than half the size of the image you posted. devs used to have actual coding skills.
>iToddler thread>it's dogshiterrytime
>>12177626>devs used to have actual coding skills.This is the answer for most "how did they do it" and "why are retro games better" threads
>>12177626
>>12177693That makes no sense. How can a still frame be half the size of the game?
>>12177741Because the game isn't a billion image files.
>>12177615flash storageepbp/thread
>>12177693That is literally a statement.
>>12177693PNG didn't exist when Mario 1 was made and wouldn't for another decadeTry again with pcx or something
>>12177693it's a lot smaller if the image isn't blown up 4x
>>12177972Not small enough, considering the size of the game.
>>12177950
>>12177693oh god we've finally hit that point with zoomers.you also didn't use indexing. optipng gets this down to <10KB. would be even less if you didn't have some retarded ClearType shit on the text.
>>12177809Ow, my head.
>>12177809tf you mean? it literally is. It scrolls to the next image after you move across the screen. How can they do that hundreds of times when a single screen is half the sizeo f the game already?
>>12177893In this instance, "making a statement" is an idiom that means "proving a point." The author is clarifying that there is no argumentative purpose to what he's saying.
>>12177972It's the text bloating the image size, not the scaling. You can take an 8x size SMB pic like that and it would still output a 3KB png without the overlaid text.
>>12178363i was curious, and yeah.
Surely the internet knows how tiles and mappers and video ram works...Nk of course they donr
>>12178373these young'uns have never seen a [56k warning] in their lives!
>>12178381
>>12178348The image was smaller than the ROM, that was the point, because the most common form of that image that tends to float around is LARGER than the ROM and boasts about how it is bigger, I spent about 10 seconds on it. And yes, I did enable PNG compression, I just didn't bother spending more than 10 seconds on it since it still gets the point across.>>12178359Pretty much this>>12178363Well yeah, PNG is vector based, that text is breaking up would have just been empty blue space, point is though that it's still smaller than the game when the original image I was referencing was gloating that it's several times larger than the game.>>12178373What would mappers have to do with it? Those just let you switch banks, and some have a few additional effects, but they don't do compression AFAIK.>>1217838156K? That didn't even exist yet when I was browsing the internet on a 14.4K
>>12178373don't forget the basic programming tricks, like the entire floor consists of the one floor tile and a snip of code telling the NES to paste it along the length of the level
do i need to read any of the text in Golden Sun, or can I just mash through it and intuit/wiki the game mechanics?
>>12178424i can't tell if you're doing a bit.
>>12178563How many bits?
>>12178587I was tempted to make that joke, but decided not to byte
>>12177626>devs used to have actual coding skillsAnd what did they all have in common?
>>12178357You're a retard.
>>12177615Sprites and code buddy. Sprites and code.
>>12177615Wait until you hear about this thing called NES
>>12177626Don't pretend to give two shits about games being small and then go on to talk as if things like the PICO-8 and Playdate don't exist
>>12177741The game represents the same information far more efficiently. It knows what tiles it uses and where they go in the levels, and that information doesn't take up much space. JPEG and PNG compression don't know anything about NES graphics or Mario stage maps and mindlessly try to simplify what they see in the image without ever noticing that it's made up of frequently repeating tiles that all have the exact same shape. Their methods work pretty well nonetheless, but the graphics-storage-and-drawing software written by the original Mario programmers was made solely to do this one simple job by the people who knew everything about that job, so naturally it does better at it than general-purpose compression algorithms do.
>>12179549>new hipster shitRetro videogames?
>>12179553Yeah that's right, bitch boy. Back off. If you don't know dick, then don't bring up and whine about the alleged state of modern development in relation to being able to meet older file sizes in the first place, you retard.
>>12179558Not retro, fuck off indie hipster
>>12179564>not retroOh if that's your cope then you shouldn't have brought up comparing to modern development in the first place then, you knuckle dragging dickwad. Guess no matter what, you're the huge faggot that's in the wrong. Damn, that sucks for you.
>>12177741Super Mario Bros draws the levels in modular elements. So to draw a row of 5 bricks it's only a couple bytes to tell where to draw in the level in the nametable. The brick sprite is indexed with a byte in the pattern table and takes 16 bytes to store in ROM. The color palette is indexed by a byte in the attribute table. The background is a selected color by default, the road is usually drawn unless there's a pit, and the HUD is always the same.
>>12178391The visible portion of the screen in VRAM is 1KB because each pixel is 2 bitsIf you quadruple that to 8 bits you get 4KB
>>12177809>>12178373>>12179552>>12179582I was baiting but also I had no real idea how programming a video game worked, so thank you anons for spoonfeeding me easily researched information. But you really should gatekeep harder to preserve board quality.
>>12179602Oh youNES hacking is why I became an engineer
>>12177615Assets, such as textures and sound are always the biggest data files. Models these days have an enormous amount of polys. GBA is almost entirely pixels and midis.
>>12178678being Japanese
>>12177615They fold the game neatly until it fits.
>>12177741You know how a PNG uses a palette, and assigns a palette to each pixel? 2D games use tilesets, which are basically bigger more detailed pixels. You can accurately depict the entirety of World 1-1 as a 224x15 image.
The NES's PPU is not capable of "drawing" any graphics. It literally had no function to draw a circle, a line, or even just a pixel for that matter. It's basically just a fancy copy-and-paste chip. It takes the tiles that are in CHR-ROM and pastes them onto the screen. There are many many ways this can be optimized and manipulated to perform functions that it seems the NES would not be capable of doing (and some games used mapper chips that allowed per-scanline or IRQ interrupts for additional effects, but this still did not allow the PPU to draw pixels or do anything other than copy and paste essentially).Morphcat has a great video on how they optimized their homebrew NES game to fit on a 40KB cartridge without relying on a mapper:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWQ0591PAxMAnd Retro Game Mechanics Explained has a great video on how some NES games used tricks to get past such limitations, such as parallax scrolling:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt73KPS_23wSome games did some things even crazier, such as Elite. The game uses wireframe 3D graphics, which the PPU is completely incapable of drawing since those are made up of lines and the PPU can't draw lines, and there are far too many possible configurations of lines that can ever appear on the screen to pre-draw them, you would literally be screenshotting every possible image the game could ever display at that point. So what they did was mount RAM to the graphics address instead of a ROM, use a CPU to render the game's 3D wireframe, and then write the graphics it rendered to that RAM that the PPU thinks is rom and will copy-and-paste onto the screen:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCqXIX84YNA
>>12177615Are you retarded?
Nintendo saved gaming
>>12177615Those things hold at least 4 MB of data. People have done the same and more with much much less.
>>12179549>the PICO-8 and Playdate don't existThey don't. They're fantasy hipstershit. Even the PICO-8 creator call it a "fantasy console" and even that is pure fantasy. It's a garbage game maker designed for low IQ no skill codelets. And like you, not retro.
>>12185482>They're fantasy hipstershiti.e.>sure there's still plenty of developers making really fun games under 32kb, but those don't count because uhhh uhhh uhhh uhhh THEY JUST DON'T OKAY?!!!!?!?!>not retroIndeed. The first anon brought up modern developers. What are you, illiterate?
>>12177615Yes back in the day you get 100hours or more playtime out of afew megabytes,kids are spoiled these days with their 10hour 120GB AAA movie campaign slop.
>>12177684based schizo
>>12185494>cope: the postGet well soon skilllet
>>12177615It's not hard to stretch a JRPG with just text and repeated assets out to 20+ hours
>>12177693>>12177972>>12178032>>12178348>>12178369>>12178381>>12178391
>>12179729>being JapaneseERRRRRRR, wrong, try again.
