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Anon likes Mario (thelemmy.club)
submitted 7 months ago by [M] to c/greentext@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 39 points 7 months ago (5 children)

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.

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  • [–] 38 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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

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

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 16 points 7 months 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!

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