Old magazines talked alot about a game being 8 meg or 16 meg

[Anthony1]

I've been looking at some old video game magazines recently, and it's funny to hear them talk so much about this game being only 4 megs, and this game being 8 megs, and this game being a 16 meg monster cart, and stuff like that.

It's almost like they felt that cause a game was 16 megs, it was way more advanced then a 4 meg cart.

Just funny to think about how petty that was, but people actually bought into it at the time. Neo Geo used to advertise that you got more meg for your buck with Neo Geo games, even though they were so expensive. Cause the cost per meg was actually less.

[zmweasel]

I've been looking at some old video game magazines recently, and it's funny to hear them talk so much about this game being only 4 megs, and this game being 8 megs, and this game being a 16 meg monster cart, and stuff like that.

It's almost like they felt that cause a game was 16 megs, it was way more advanced then a 4 meg cart.

Just funny to think about how petty that was, but people actually bought into it at the time. Neo Geo used to advertise that you got more meg for your buck with Neo Geo games, even though they were so expensive. Cause the cost per meg was actually less.

Megs DID matter back in the cart days, though -- as early as the Atari 2600, when Atari noticed that 4k carts (with their "superior" graphics and sound) were out-selling 2k carts.

Megs also still matter on the GBA, where a 128-meg cart (such as Rayman 3) has noticeably kick-ass graphics and sound in comparison to a 32- or 64-meg cart, which has to recycle its assets.

In fact, with few exceptions, the 32-meg GBA titles are always from quick-and-dirty developers, and not much fun to play.

-- Z.

[hydr0x]

Megs DO make a difference, there are great 4Mbit games (i think SUper Mario World is 4Mbit), BUT you can clearly see/hear they have less Mbit, just look at SMW, so many 1-color areas on every screen!!! Just look at the 48Mbit game Tales Of Phantasia, speech, a intro song, reflections on the water... Mbit are not everything, but for great graphics and sound you need a good compression or more Mbit

[YoshiM]

Like the others said, more was typically better. More space to use more graphics, better sound, smoother animation and possibly more game (as seen in RPGs). Comparing a bit Megabit cart to a standard cart one could easily see the difference. So it wasn't just a lot of hooey like "blast processing" was.

[Alex Kidd]

Why is it back in the day of the 8 bit and 16 bit video game systems were the cart size measured in 'bits'?
I mean, even by the late 80's the term bit was practically never used in computer terms, it was always byte, cause aside from talking about a specific bit within the byte, untill you have the full 8 bits to make a byte, you got nothing.

I was always impressed to think that the SMS was releasing 1 to 4 meg games back when they were new cause, till I realized they were 1 to 4 MegaBITS, which really only equaled out to a game that was only 128k to 512k.
Not to bash the games, they were still great and all, but was this type of naming just used to exaggerate how much they were storing untill we read the fine print?

PS
I notice as said above and such that many gameboy advance games lits meg size; are they listing megaBYTE size or megaBIT size?
AND when the Atari 2600 had it 2k, 4k, etc games, were they 2 and 4 kiloBITS or kiloBYTES?

Alex Kidd

[The Unknown Gamer]

Megs do matter or ask yourself why everything these days are on DVDs. 4.6 gigs holds a hell of a lot more than 650 megs on average for a CD. The first time I really started to notice the megs when bought Sonic & Knunkles locked on to Sonic 3 thats 32 megs.

[Ed Oscuro]

Megs do matter or ask yourself why everything these days are on DVDs. 4.6 gigs holds a hell of a lot more than 650 megs on average for a CD. The first time I really started to notice the megs when bought Sonic & Knunkles locked on to Sonic 3 thats 32 megs.

I don't think it's quite clear what's ment by "megs" here. You might be interested to know that an average Nintendo 64 game might be 128 Megabits -- divide by eight and you'll find the size as we measure it in the computer world.

Castlevania was a One Meg game, but in the computer world we say it's 128K (or 128 Kbytes). The SMS port of Shinobi was a "Two-Mega Cartridge" which is only 256K.

It's a marketing trick, nothing more.

[bensenvill]

ya, remember its megaBits not bytes. So a 16meg card is really only 2megabytes. On the flip side a 700meg CD would need a 5.6gigabit cart.

I've always been a tech guy and been sold on the numbers. I remember being absolutely obsessed with bubsy simply because it was a 16meg'er (and that it was suppose to be fast).

And you cant say that neo-geo wasnt da bomb at the time (with their 400+ meg carts, lol).

~tj