"Super Mario World" is still the masterpiece game ever. It has amazing characters, sprites, and stages packed into only 360 KB.
Probably would get better number by extracting each zip and look how much zero padding is at the end of the file. WDYT?
If you don't have an RLE tool handy, you can force Pucrunch to act as an RLE-only compressor by using the -r 0 switch which disables the LZ compression feature.
But... I'd love to know how often assets were compressed on "normal" carts without special chips.
Decompressing assets on the fly during gameplay action seems like it would be quite a challenge for the SNES' CPU.
My understanding is that images on title screens and cinematics were often compressed. Anime/comic art styles lend themselves really well to RLE compression because you have lots of consecutive pixels of the same color. And, obviously, these can be fairly static images that don't need to be updated 60 times a second.
Definitely an outlier, but: the title screen of Secret of Mana was actually a JPG that took around a minute (!!) to decompress. The music and scrolling text are cleverly designed to mask this: https://manaredux.com/lore/how-was-the-incredible-title-scre...
Likewise, text needs to be decompressed once immediately before it's displayed, so games will usually compress that - it's quick enough to decompress a few hundred bytes while the text box loads.
The only thing that I've seen that's usually stored uncompressed is sprite animation data - particularly for player characters with lots of different animations. There's not enough VRAM to load all of it at once, so it needs to be streamed in, and in that case the CPU often just doesn't have the muscle.
Made me ponder a bit.
Generally for a modern polygonal game, you are using skeletal animation for the characters. A character consists of a polygon mesh and anywhere from dozens to hundreds of bones.
Animations consist of keyframes. Each keyframe represents just a handful of bytes for each bone (the XYZ coordinates for each end of the bone, and the rotational angle, or something like that). The animators create as many keyframes as they want, maybe 10-20 per second max. So a 5-second emote animation might contain something like 8 32-bit floats * 100 bones * 10 frames per second * 5 seconds = ~120 kilobytes of uncompressed data.
That's all you need to specify an animation. The rest is calculated on the fly at runtime and rendered to the screen at 60fps or whatever the current frame rate is. The graphics engine interpolates bone positions between your keyframes, and the player model mesh is deformed by the bones. Also, those skeletal animations can be shared between all player models.
The alternative to skeletal animation is fully prebaked animations. This involves minimal interpolation and calculation at runtime. It is more memory intensive because you are calculating the position of every point on the mesh ahead of time, and then storing that data on disk. This is generally how a very complex and non-interactive animation (think: cutscenes, etc) would be animated and stored on disk. Note, this is still far less storage-intensive than storing rendered video, and you still maintain a great deal of flexibility at runtime - you can change the camera location, rendering passes, resolution, etc. That's why you don't see a lot of prerendered video cutscenes these days.
Terranigma is right up there as well for me; Super Mario World is probably number 3 in my book.
I think the driving force behind this for many is it's much harder to steal video content. With text bits can scrape it change a few words and reuse it on an SEO ad site.
It isn't as if you could have a map editor and adjust the levels or the order of the levels, though you could run the generation procedure to find new levels to your liking.
Still an amazing game. In 4k it is astonishing.
[1]: https://youtu.be/tfAnxaWiSeE?list=PL2e4mYbwSTbbiX2uwspn0xiYb...
Quite a feat considering how horrifyingly difficult programming the 2600 was. Even the SDK was fairly barebones, basically a VT100 connected to a PDP-11 running RT8 and a 6502 assembler