I was looking at a production service we run that was using a few GBs of memory. When I add up all the actual data needed in a naive compact representation I end up with a few MBs. So much waste. That's before thinking of clever ways to compress, or de-duplicate or rearrange that data.
Back in the day getting the 16KB expansion pack for my 1KB RAM ZX81 was a big deal. And I also wrote code for PIC microcontrollers that have 768 bytes of program memory [and 25 bytes of RAM]. It's just so easy to not think about efficiency today, you write one line of code in a high level language and you blow away more bytes than these platforms had without doing anything useful.
I grew up with and absolutely adore The Last Ninja series. I'm not going to comment on the size thing because it's so trite.
Instead - here's [0] Ben Daglish (on flute) performing "Wastelands" together with the Norwegian C64/Amiga tribute band FastLoaders. He unfortunately passed away in 2018, just 52 years old.
If that tickled your fancy, here's [1] a full concert with them where they perform all songs from The Last Ninja.
The first time I ever heard The Glitch Mob I had such a clear memory of this games soundtrack come to mind that I mentioned it to my brother soon after (as it was his commodore and his copy of the game I was playing when I was young). I'm not even sure if the song I heard even sounds like the game soundtrack particularly closely, but the connection in my mind was very strong.
I remember this game, the way it drew itself on each screen, the nice graphics. Growing up with games on Atari, Commodore, Amstrad, and Spectrum, was a lot of fun.
By comparison, COD Modern Warfare 3 is 6,000,000 times larger at 240GB. Imagine telling that to someone in 1987.
X264 supports a lossless mode without chroma subsampling, which produces very good compression for raw emulator captures of retro game footage. It is much better than other codecs like HuffYuv, etc.
But for some reason, Firefox refuses to play back those kinds of files.
But for some reason, Firefox refuses to play back those kinds of files.
And that reason is because x264 is a free and open source implementation of the H.264 codec, and you still need to pay a license to use the patented technology regardless of how you do that. Using a free implementation of the code doesn't get you a free license for the codec.
I'm not sure this is particularly telling. You can write a tiny program that generates a 4K image, and the image could be 1000x larger.
Or, if I write a short description "A couple walks hand-in-hand through a park at sunset. The wind rustles the orange leaves.", I don't think it would be surprising to anyone that an image or video of this would be relatively huge.
Masterpieces like these are a perfect demonstration that performance relies not only on fast processors, but on understanding how your data and code compete for resources. Truly admirable. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Wow that search/interact mechanic is obnoxious, you can see the player fumbling it every time, despite knowing exactly where the item is they’re trying to collect.
This is sort of the defining mechanic of these games in my memory. The first thing that pops into my head when I think of Last Ninja is aligning and realigning myself, and squatting, awkwardly and repeatedly (just like a real ninja, lol), until that satisfying new item icon appears. Perhaps surprisingly, these are very fond memories.
This mechanic is augmented by not even always knowing which graphics in the environment can be picked up, or by invisible items that are inside boxes or otherwise out of sight (I think LN2 had something in a bathroom? You have to position yourself in the doorway and do a squat of faith).
The other core memory is the spots that require a similarly awkward precision while jumping. These are worse, because each failure loses you one of your limited lives. The combat is also finicky. I remember if you come into a fight misaligned, your opponent might quickly drain your energy while you fail to get a hit in.
At the time, it seemed appropriate to me that it required such a difficult precision to be a ninja. I was also a kid, who approached every game non-critically, assuming each game was exactly as it was meant to be. Thus I absolutely loved it, lol.
Apparently this person is referring to the available ram on a Commodore 64. The media (data) on disk or tape was much more than that.
Not much more. It all fits on a single side of a 1541 floppy. Even considering compression it couldn't be more than a couple hundred kilobytes.
https://csdb.dk/release/?id=99145
It's not much, but relatively speaking it's much more.
I was looking at a production service we run that was using a few GBs of memory. When I add up all the actual data needed in a naive compact representation I end up with a few MBs. So much waste. That's before thinking of clever ways to compress, or de-duplicate or rearrange that data.
Back in the day getting the 16KB expansion pack for my 1KB RAM ZX81 was a big deal. And I also wrote code for PIC microcontrollers that have 768 bytes of program memory [and 25 bytes of RAM]. It's just so easy to not think about efficiency today, you write one line of code in a high level language and you blow away more bytes than these platforms had without doing anything useful.
I grew up with and absolutely adore The Last Ninja series. I'm not going to comment on the size thing because it's so trite.
Instead - here's [0] Ben Daglish (on flute) performing "Wastelands" together with the Norwegian C64/Amiga tribute band FastLoaders. He unfortunately passed away in 2018, just 52 years old.
If that tickled your fancy, here's [1] a full concert with them where they perform all songs from The Last Ninja.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovFgdcapUYI [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTZ1O1LJg-k
The first time I ever heard The Glitch Mob I had such a clear memory of this games soundtrack come to mind that I mentioned it to my brother soon after (as it was his commodore and his copy of the game I was playing when I was young). I'm not even sure if the song I heard even sounds like the game soundtrack particularly closely, but the connection in my mind was very strong.
I remember this game, the way it drew itself on each screen, the nice graphics. Growing up with games on Atari, Commodore, Amstrad, and Spectrum, was a lot of fun.
By comparison, COD Modern Warfare 3 is 6,000,000 times larger at 240GB. Imagine telling that to someone in 1987.
That short video of the game on twitter is 11.5MB, or about 300x larger than the game itself.
X264 supports a lossless mode without chroma subsampling, which produces very good compression for raw emulator captures of retro game footage. It is much better than other codecs like HuffYuv, etc.
But for some reason, Firefox refuses to play back those kinds of files.
But for some reason, Firefox refuses to play back those kinds of files.
And that reason is because x264 is a free and open source implementation of the H.264 codec, and you still need to pay a license to use the patented technology regardless of how you do that. Using a free implementation of the code doesn't get you a free license for the codec.
I'm not sure this is particularly telling. You can write a tiny program that generates a 4K image, and the image could be 1000x larger.
Or, if I write a short description "A couple walks hand-in-hand through a park at sunset. The wind rustles the orange leaves.", I don't think it would be surprising to anyone that an image or video of this would be relatively huge.
It's kind of amazing how much of those old games was actual logic instead of data.
Feels like they were closer to programs, while modern games are closer to datasets.
Masterpieces like these are a perfect demonstration that performance relies not only on fast processors, but on understanding how your data and code compete for resources. Truly admirable. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Wow that search/interact mechanic is obnoxious, you can see the player fumbling it every time, despite knowing exactly where the item is they’re trying to collect.
This is sort of the defining mechanic of these games in my memory. The first thing that pops into my head when I think of Last Ninja is aligning and realigning myself, and squatting, awkwardly and repeatedly (just like a real ninja, lol), until that satisfying new item icon appears. Perhaps surprisingly, these are very fond memories.
This mechanic is augmented by not even always knowing which graphics in the environment can be picked up, or by invisible items that are inside boxes or otherwise out of sight (I think LN2 had something in a bathroom? You have to position yourself in the doorway and do a squat of faith).
The other core memory is the spots that require a similarly awkward precision while jumping. These are worse, because each failure loses you one of your limited lives. The combat is also finicky. I remember if you come into a fight misaligned, your opponent might quickly drain your energy while you fail to get a hit in.
At the time, it seemed appropriate to me that it required such a difficult precision to be a ninja. I was also a kid, who approached every game non-critically, assuming each game was exactly as it was meant to be. Thus I absolutely loved it, lol.
A game which was actually 40 kilobytes: Super Mario Bros. It had 32 side-scrolling levels.
The same size as Super Mario Bros. (NES, 1985)