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Comment by shultays | Hacker News Reader

let's include an entire nes emulator with it then. fceux seems to be about 8mb

  displaying at high resolutions

irrelevant

  sand physics

how much of binary that would add?

  What's your point?

My point was to highlight how much overhead modern software adds.

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Modern technology usually complicates things and adds overhead, it's part of technological advancement isn't it?

> irrelevant

Why?

because it wouldn't affect the binary size in meaningful way

That's not true at all. The whole reason why graphics on the original NES were so compact is because the color palette was so limited. Not only that, but tiles could only have a maximum of 4 colors within them, one of which was considered the "transparent" color if you wanted blending. So they were only 2 bits.

So yes, it does absolutely and unequivocally affect the binary size. Having made NES games for fun before, they are two completely different worlds and it's not at all fair to compare them.

I disagree. A comparison of "higher resolution" in the terms of NES would only mean an increase in nametable size, not in binary size of program. Of course if "increase in resolution" also meant increase in CHR size or sprite count, or color palette size then you would be correct.

My point in NES or in modern software, the target resolution you want wouldn't have an affect on binary size.

  Having made NES games for fun before

So I am. You are right, a more fair comparison would be a tetris.exe perhaps. But my point would still stand, 60mb (and that is zipped amount) orders of magnitude higher.

I want to ask the same question, what is your point? Are you arguing that java runtime or several dependencies OP added is not an indication of modern software bloat?

I'm saying that the capabilities of the game in question and the original Tetris are also orders of magnitude larger, you just don't see them directly because you're biased to comparing this game to the original due to its visual and gameplay style, and that comparing the two to measure the value of "bloat" is an absurd thing to do.

Sorry but sand physics is probably doable in a few kb (yes, that's kilobytes) of JS.

This is different and simpler but just 140 bytes (not k): https://codepen.io/KilledByAPixel/pen/WNGQWZG

Nothing in that game justifies being more than 1mb (being very generous...) minified as a browser app.

You're also ignoring the fact that most of this functionality happened in chips. That's not the case with modern machines.

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