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Wasn't this true even on other Nintendo consoles? Gameboy and Gameboy Color cartridges did similar if not even more outlandish things, like the GameBoy Camera
I'm wondering why the console CPU wasn't running at 4x the clock rate to begin with, if the cartridges could easily and cheaply include one so much better. I guess that's just how fast CPUs were improving back then. A CPU from just a few years prior was that obsolete. Crazy!
Unlike modern chips with cache hierarchies and the like, the 65816 is designed to run in lock step with the memory it’s accessing. A faster CPU would have necessitated faster RAM in the system and faster ROMs on the carts too. Games were expensive enough as it was, then.
Then Nintendo DS was the first Nintendo handheld to use a cache.
I love any and all research on these systems. It completely blows my mind that something as complex and fun as Mario Kart was only 350KB in size. You can't even get a 'hello world' binary that small for most languages today. Yeah, it's custom and tuned, but that's a lot of fun packed with at the time 'good graphics' in the size of a single low quality jpeg of today.
> The author of DOOM for SNES, Randy Linden, did not have access to any documentation about the GSU chip or even DOOM source code. He reverse engineered all of it Technically this is impressive, but why was it necessary?
Some Details on the Doom Wiki ( https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Super_NES ): Randy Linden, the port's sole programmer, initiated the port of Doom for the Super NES on his own initially, as he was fascinated by the game. Since Doom's source code was not yet released at the time, Linden referred to the Unofficial Doom Specs as a means of understanding the game's lump layout in detail. The resources were extracted from the IW…
I hope developers still love to blog details with article mode like this, rather than vlogging it on YouTube. A lot of detail packed into a few kilobytes only. "Super Mario World" is still the masterpiece game ever. It has amazing characters, sprites, and stages packed into only 360 KB.
Yoshi’s Island 4 has a slowdown in some circumstances (have Yoshi, get Starman and hit P-Switch), as does another level I can’t recall, exactly… it has a bunch of Monty Moles that explode all at once. I think it’s on Chocolate Island. I think there might be a third with two Sumo Bros. and an Amazing Flying Hammer Bro. onscreen.
I love any and all research on these systems. It completely blows my mind that something as complex and fun as Mario Kart was only 350KB in size. You can't even get a 'hello world' binary that small for most languages today. Yeah, it's custom and tuned, but that's a lot of fun packed with at the time 'good graphics' in the size of a single low quality jpeg of today.
Well, we have to account for the fact that modern system simply don't require that much optimization and compression. Working with stricter limits meant that dev teams had to get creative and minimize file size, while nowadays a single game update can be around 20 GB.
Irrespective of the abundance of storage we now enjoy, and even though I could rationally understand the reasons, this will always make me raise an eyebrow or sigh.
I hope developers still love to blog details with article mode like this, rather than vlogging it on YouTube. A lot of detail packed into a few kilobytes only. "Super Mario World" is still the masterpiece game ever. It has amazing characters, sprites, and stages packed into only 360 KB.
The file sizes given by the site are wrong. Super Mario World is 512KB, or 508KB if you discard the padding at the end. Only compressing it to ZIP format gives you a file size around 360KB.
Probably would get better number by extracting each zip and look how much zero padding is at the end of the file. WDYT?
Where do the byte counts for the various games come from? The games came on ROM chips that were, as ROM chip are wont to, sized to powers-of-two. For instance, Super Mario World was shipped on a 512kb ROM - where does 346,330 bytes come from? Are these compressed sizes?
Too late for today, I will write that tomorrow and update the article.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The file sizes given by the site are wrong. Super Mario World is 512KB, or 508KB if you discard the padding at the end. Only compressing it to ZIP format gives you a file size around 360KB.
Yea, after writing this I regretted using zip to estimate usage. Probably would get better number by extracting each zip and look how much zero padding is at the end of the file. WDYT?
If you don't have an RLE tool handy, you can force Pucrunch to act as an RLE-only compressor by using the -r 0 switch which disables the LZ compression feature.