A jpeg image is designed to hold any photograph. It can potentially display millions of colors, and needs to contain that data for possibly millions of pixels of on-screen data. Jpeg image compression does save some space compared to a bitmap which is literally 3 bytes of color data for every pixel in the image, but there’s only so optimized it can get before it can’t be used to store any possible photograph.

The image above is 500x321 pixels with 32-bit ARGB color; so each pixel not only has independent red, green and blue data, but also 8 bits of transparency data.

Super Mario Bros runs on the Nintendo Entertainment System, which has a working resolution of 256 x240 pixels. It has the capability of displaying 25 colors on screen simultaneously out of a total possible palette of 54 usable colors. It draws the background and foreground layers as “tiles” so you can store whole tiles in memory and then repeat them, and then on top of that it can draw hardware sprites which is how things that move more on screen like Mario, enemies etc. are made.

Things like the animations of the question mark blocks which seem to shine or blink a bit, that’s done by cycling the colors that the sprite is being drawn with. Big Mario and Fire Mario are the same sprite but color swapped. The bushes and the clouds are the same shape, but different colors. The super mushroom and power mushroom are the same sprite but different colors. The underworld levels are just different colors on the same sprites as the overworld.

The sound chip on the NES is very simple, it has five voice polyphony and can make two square waves, one triangle wave, one hiss-like noise, and one PCM sample sound (not used to my knowledge in SMB1; it’s how the steel drum sounds in the SMB3 sound track were made) and so what is stored on the cartridge for audio is more like sheet music than recorded sound. An mp3 file of the Ground Theme would also likely be larger than the entire game.

SMB1 is also just…a VERY primitive game. It cannot scroll vertically (SMB2, the one that’s Doki Doki Panic in Japan, it can scroll vertically OR horizontally but not both at the same time; SMB3 could do both at the same time as showcased by the raccoon tail powerup, but it required a RAM expansion built into the cartridge) It can’t go backwards because it doesn’t record the state of objects that have scrolled off the screen. It has no save system or even a password system.

Finally, the game was made in 6502 assembly with the specific hardware of the NES in mind; which saves a lot of resources compared to all the abstractions needed for higher level languages and their abstractions.

Also is this an AI making a dumb blonde joke?

The oldest functioning system I have is an Atari 2600. it was originally my mother’s.

Transcript of me examining this picture:

"Okay, face looks okay, jacket makes sense, let’s look at the hands. Looks like four fingers on her left hand there, the right hand, thumb’s a little screwy, is that a stick or is she part tarsier? Something’s kind of screwy there. Boots look about right, there’s even a pretty decent depth of field on the sho-THE FIRE IS IN THE TENT.

That’s my plan with the doctor that failed to diagnose my appendicitis. He was easily in his 60’s, I was 19. I’m gonna actuarial table his ass.

I’m a guy, I’m already damned to tit loans. I only get to borrow tits for awhile.

He has published his audio book about the airship R101 under a creative commons license, if you haven’t seen that yet I’d check it out.

You could say the same thing of the NES. The crash of '83 had as much to do with the mountains of shovelware on the market for the early consoles and microcomputers that might not even load and run. You got a lot of knockoffs, branded merchandise, and other low effort crap the programmer didn’t actually give a shit about flooding the market, which inflated the bubble, then it burst.

A large part of Nintendo’s strategy for entering a crashed market was to address this with their Seal Of Quality. Using anything from the design patent of the cartridge shell to security chips, they enforced a monopoly on manufacturing cartridges for their systems; Nintendo was the only manufacturer of Nintendo cartridges. And their Seal Of Quality meant they had inspected the game and made sure it is functional software, that it loads and runs without crashing. They don’t guarantee the game is fun, which is why Superman 64 was allowed to be published. It’s a garbage game but it doesn’t crash an N64.

Other platforms aren’t as strict with their libraries, which means there’s more and cheaper games out there for it. The extreme example is Steam on PC, where their algorithm is “publish whatever is submitted and pull it down if someone raises a legitimate complaint.” There’s a lot of great games on Steam, there’s a lot of Unity tutorial projects on Steam. Their excellent refund policies make this acceptable.

I am okay with some billboards that advertise services that are relevant to motorists, such as fuel, food or lodging near the road.

Product placements in television shows where the ad becomes part of the fiction.

I officially stopped watching Eureka when there was an episode about Degree For Men. I similarly gave up on Bones when the characters started delivering Toyota ads to each other.

I’m okay with there being a stick of Degree For Men label out in Sheriff Carter’s bathroom, or if the cast of Bones drive Toyotas. But when they stop to talk about long lasting anti-wetness or zero percent APR financing I’m fucking done.

That’s exactly what I was referencing. They pissed off Sony by working with Phillips on the CD-i. Hilarious.

Compounding this was the Sega CD and 32X addons for the Genesis. Both were projects the scale of a new console, but they were built as addons to the Genesis so they limited their audience to people who already had a Genesis. Neither really brought much to the table in terms of software libraries; lots of Sega CD games were Genesis titles with red book CD audio instead of FM synth chip tunes, or the occasional FMV title.

Then they brought out the Saturn, which some people even bought. It was a Sega console that had no Sonic game.

So going into the Dreamcast, Sega had three poorly performing consoles in their back catalog. I don’t think the Dreamcast could have been a big enough success to save Sega’s console division, and especially not with Sony about to dominate the 6th AND 7th generations with the PS2.

Man I haven’t heard the name RocketBoom in so long. Wonder what ever happened to MeMe Molly?

The Engineer Guy just stopped uploading.

Same with Afrotechmods. TOP NOTCH electronics tutorial videos, he just stopped posting.

Pushing Up Roses, as she explained it herself, has pretty much said what she wanted to say about retro video games and largely does TV now with the occasional modern adventure game review thrown in. I wish her well but I’m no longer her audience.

DistroTube. Did Linux related content who might have an 88 tattooed on his neck by now.

Scott Manley. Similar to PUR, the content he makes kind of drifted out from under my interests; I became a fan of his Kerbal Space Program playthroughs and demonstrations of space flight concepts, but as far as I know now he basically does space news stuff now, which is perfectly cool but my attention wandered elsewhere.

Bright Sun Films. Once again there wasn’t a “nope not watching this anymore” moment, I think I just had my fill of Abandoned.

(dis)Honorable Mention: The Escapist. I no longer watch that channel but I am still a fan, viewer and patron of the talent themselves. Their new channel Second Wind is the most hilarious instance of owning the means of production I’ve ever seen.

The Modern Rogue certainly had a heyday. Past tense.

Biden shared a stage tonight with the only man he can reasonably defeat in this election. I think I should announce my candidacy, I could run on a “my dick can get hard without pharmaceuticals” platform.

You know what’s funny? Nintendo put expansion slots on the bottom of all of their consoles prior to the Wii. In Japan, they were used for the Famicom Disk System, the Satellaview, the N64DD and the Gameboy Player. The latter was the only one that made it to the West. They never released an expansion for a console outside of Asia. They even had to retool several games that were released on Famicom diskettes for cartridges in the West, including inventing on-cartridge save files via battery-backed RAM for The Legend of Zelda in order to release them in the West.

Given Sega’s track record with console expansions, Nintendo might have been just as well off. Well, except for how the SNES optical drive add-on played out.

A Dell Inspiron laptop.

It just kept dying. Typing a Word document one moment, black screen the next. I bought this thing in August because I was going back to school and I needed a new laptop. By December I finally convinced them to replace the machine outright. I got a different model that lacked a lot of the features I had ordered.

I’m no longer a Dell customer.

It’s called a “Pig Butchering Scam” and no, they won’t (directly) ask for money from you. The scam industry knows people are suspicious of that.

What they do is become your friend. They’ll actually talk to you, for weeks if not months on end. the idea is to gain trust, to be “this isn’t a scammer, scammers wouldn’t go to these lengths.” One day your new friend will mention that his investment in crypto or whatever is returning nicely, and of course you’ll say “how much are you earning?” They’ll never ask you for money, but they’ll be happy to tell you what app to go download from the App store to “invest” in. It looks legit as fuck, often times you can actually do your homework and it checks out. Except somehow it doesn’t.

Don’t befriend people who text you out of the blue.

I am completely done with the “male character says something chauvanistic, female character slaps, that’s the joke.”

Futurama did it quite a lot, Leela hit Fry a lot, Amy hit him a few times. I done with shows that do that. I see that joke happen again I’ll stop the playback right then and there and cancel whatever service I’m watching it on.