8 years ago
3
Dave Baggett answers "How did game developers pack entire games into so little memory twenty five years ago?"
Software titles for home game systems used 64K to 128K cartridges and yet provided game play for hours along with various graphics, sprites and sound. It seems that the game systems themselves must have provided a fair amount of functionality (utility functions, libraries, hardware acceleration and graphics instructions) but the sheer number of images, music and sounds, animations, algorithms for game play and so on is impressive to fit in such an extremely small amount of space.
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For another view of programming around limitations, watch the Dave Braben ad GDC presentation in the additional links.
Very interesting read. Couldn't understand most of it but very useful information on what it takes to get the job done.
Yeah, I got most I think, but I wouldn't know where to start to do what they were talking about. As you said, it's nice to hear about what they had to do back in the day when memory was a real limitation.