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Some software bloat is OK

(waspdev.com)
56 points senfiaj | 2 comments | 04 Nov 25 08:27 UTC | HN request time: 0.415s | source
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jerdman76 ◴[04 Nov 25 15:05 UTC] No.45811802[source]▶
This article is awesome - I love the meme

As a former CS major (30 years ago) that went into IT for my first career, I've wondered about bloat and this article gave me the layman explanation.

I am still blown away by the comparison of pointing out that the WEBP image of SuperMario is larger in size than the Super Mario game itself!

replies(1): >>45812057 #
masfuerte ◴[04 Nov 25 15:26 UTC] No.45812057[source]▶
The Mario picture is very misleading. It's not lossless. It has way too many colours. An actual lossless screenshot (albeit not as wide) is only 3KB:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NES_Super_Mario_Bros.png

replies(1): >>45814279 #
senfiaj ◴[04 Nov 25 18:29 UTC] No.45814279[source]▶
Sorry. My bad. Looks like the size is also very sensitive to the method of compression and software as well (regardless of being PNG or WEBP). I found another PNG picture here https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/where-do-all-the-bytes-com... it is 64KiB. When you stretch the image, it's also likely to add kilobytes. I guess I need to update the image.

But anyways, I think it's still very demonstrative when an entire game size is smaller than its picture. Also consider that even your tiny PNG example (3.37KiB) still cannot fit into the the RAM / VRAM of a NES console which shows the contrast between these eras in regards of amounts of memory.

replies(1): >>45816287 #
1. masfuerte ◴[04 Nov 25 21:51 UTC] No.45816287[source]▶
> I found another PNG picture here

That image has a similar problem to yours. It has been scaled up using some kind of interpolation which introduces a load of extra colours to smooth the edges. This is not a great fit for PNG, which is why it is 64KB.

The article claims that it is only 5.9KB. I guess it was that small originally and it's been mangled by the publishing process.

replies(1): >>45818145 #
2. senfiaj ◴[05 Nov 25 01:55 UTC] No.45818145[source]▶
I think a more realistic comparison is a BMP image (16 or 256 color) because the game didn't compress the image the way PNG or WebP does. When I converted that tiny ~3KiB image to 16 color BMP the size was 28.1KiB, for 256 color it was 57KiB. But some colors were lost.

Anyways I don't think we can have 100% apple to apple comparison, because the game used a different compression and rendering technique. Also consider the actual amount of RAM / VRAM the images are occupying. In RAM / VRAM they are probably in a decompressed form which is much more memory.