• zurohki@aussie.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    30
    ·
    17 hours ago

    IIRC the reason Luigi isn’t in Mario 64 is that they couldn’t afford the extra few kilobytes that would take.

    It’s not like they wanted parts of the game to be empty, cartridges were tiny. Mario 64 had a one megabyte cartridge. They had to cut things to the bone to manage to fit the game on that.

    • cdf12345@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 hour ago

      Also the reason why everything on N64 were just shaded polygons (to save space) and in the PlayStation it was all texture mapped

    • MurrayL@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      29
      ·
      16 hours ago

      Small correction - Mario 64 was on an 8MB cartridge.

      There were some 4MB games, but a 1MB cartridge never existed.

      • zurohki@aussie.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        14 hours ago

        Mmm. The source I found probably got megabytes and megabits mixed up. Cartridges often seemed to have their capacity listed in megabits for some reason.

        • MurrayL@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          14 hours ago

          Yeah possibly, if they converted in the wrong direction.

          There are 8 bits in a byte, so 8MB cartridges like Mario 64 were generally advertised as 64 Megabit. But if someone got mixed up they could’ve assumed the 8MB figure was actually 8Mbit and then divided by 8 to reach the wrong conclusion of 1MB.

          As to why they advertised things using megabits back in the day, that’s pretty easy: bigger numbers seem more impressive in marketing!