64KB Games vs. Your 2MB App: What Modern Developers Forgot About Constraints | Comuniq

Super Mario Bros shipped in 40KB. A bare React app ships more before you write a line of your own. What did they know that we forgot?

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    142·
    9 hours ago

    When I say that to younger developers, they nod politely and then ask what the catch is, because in their world nothing is ever just what it says. There isn’t a catch.

    There’s absolutely a catch. You wrote that code for a single piece of hardware. You hand tuned it for that one specific platform taking advantage of every trick you could find. It probably took longer to write than your website and it didn’t really matter if it wasn’t perfect.

    You can’t buy a system that slow or that memory constrained anymore (spare me your weird embedded processors, you know what I mean). Move on.

    • squaresinger@lemmy.world
      5·
      7 hours ago

      The other catch is something OOP mentions right at the beginning: The main reason their app was 2MB large was because it had images.

      You couldn’t do full-frame images on a SNES. Instead, images were built up by pasting small sprites and repeating background tiles everywhere.

      If you want high-res images with a colordepth of more than 13 colors per pixel, you will need a lot of storage space for that.