Your first memory?

[Harrison]

True.

As I've said before, I was surprised (and kind of disheartened) when I found out how small Mega Drive/SNES cartridge data was. And some of those games were £50+ !!!!

The size of a game's data is never an indication of the
quality of the game. These days games have expanded to fill the huge media available to hold them and in turn have often been a victim of sloppy development. When a developer had to code for a very limited storage size the innovations were often far larger than anything seen these days.

[J T]

No, I know that the amount of data isn't indicative of the quality of the game, it was probably more the ease at which they could be downloaded in literally seconds in most cases. Partially due to the increasing speed of internet connections too, but I'm sure you see what I was getting at. It was certainly surprising when it dawned on me anyway.

[Harrison]

Oh yeah, I see your point. It is amazing to think that some of the best SNES games could fit on a floppy disk. But then some of the best Amiga games did come on a single floppy disk at the same time.

But also, at that time 800KB of data was viewed as being quite big. These days it's considered very small.

[J T]

Exactly, a reasonably high res high quality JPEG can be that size or more.

Also, I guess the physical size of the carts (and the chips therein) - think about how small say an SD card is, and they can hold 4gb! And probably have miles better read/write rates.

Incredible how things have moved on.

[Harrison]

I was thinking about the size SD cards had become only the other day. It was when sitting playing my PSP. I suddenly thought how it was quite amazing that I was now about to use a 4GB solid state storage device in a portable system when only 10 years ago we were being amazed by the first 1GB harddrives for our computers.