I knew patch files were small (often smaller than their metadata) but I wouldn’t have guessed they were THAT small. I think we’ll see somebody running a spinoff soon, as well as domain squatters offering malware-ridden copies of Lunar Magic (the patching tool).
The whole of Super Mario Bros is smaller than a single screenshot of the game.
Popular myth but untrue.
The ROM is exactly 40 kiB or 40 960 bytes. The NES outputs video at a resolution of 256×240=61 440 pixels. The game never switches palettes mid-frame and thus the highest possible number of colors (of the 64 available ones, of which 55 are distinct) in any screenshot is: 4 sprite palettes × 3 non-transparent colors per palette = 12 colors among all sprites; plus 4 background palettes × 3 selectable colors per palette + 1 selectable color shared between all palettes = 13 colors in the background; or 25 colors in total.
Even one of the most basic lossless image formats, GIF, can use an n-bit palette of 2ⁿ−1 arbitrary colors plus transparent, where 1≤n≤8. For n=5, we can store up to 31 colors at 5 bits per pixel, or 307 200 bits total, which is 38 400 bytes. The palette entries, size etc. will take about 200 bytes at most, and LZW compression built into the format (or even better, whatever PNG uses) can be used to reduce the file size further (significanly because there are huge areas filled with solid color or patterns).
I’d bet it’s possible to make an NES ROM that does nothing but fill the screen with noise-like tiles and switches the colors mid-frame, likely in just 8 kiB of video ROM plus 2 kiB of program ROM, whose screenshots will never compress to below 10 kiB in PNG format, though.
You’re absolutely correct, but you and I both know that normal people are going to only manage to create a dithered JPG that’s almost half a MB in size.
AFAIK the majority of compression in GIF and PNG comes from local similarity. GIF uses run-length encoding. PNG pixels can copy the color to their left, or any of the three pixels above them.
The smoothness of natural images is why Quite Okay Imaging can compete with PNG, despite touching each pixel exactly once.
Isn’t it a bit disingenuous to call it an emulation site? It’s not like they hosted ROMs or anything.
I understand that this is a big loss for the emulation community, but as someone who did a bit of romhacking during COVID, I found their moderation to be terrible and arbitrary.
