benheckc wrote:I think they called games in megabits back in the day to make the cartridges sound bigger. What sounds more impressive to a 11 year old? 128k or 1 MEGABIT??
No, a bit isn't just to sound more impressive. Bit was the original measure of computer data.
A bit is also known as a
Binary Digi
t, which is equated to a switch, either on or off.
You have 0(off) or 1(on).
People soon found that it took 8 bits usually for certain applications, such as coding a specific character from the keyboard.
Since most data is, as a result of this, in multiples of 8 bits in size, they came up with bytes. There is also a reason in there for using a less known measurement called a nybble, but that escapes me at this time.
Sega didn't CHOOSE bit as their unit, though. It is the standard for many ROMs, even EPROMS are listed as BIT(27c256 is 256Kbit, or 32KB), and I know for a fact the NES/Famicom was reffered to in the same way.
Besides, if that were the case, they'd advertise the size of the ROM, which they didn't. Why would they? No one was going to open up the cartridge to see how big it was...few people even knew what it meant!
They may have even gotten confused, since the "bit" was the term used to sell the people with the power of the system until quite recently(8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit, 128-bit, etc.) Read a MegaDrive/Genesis Mk-I's, and what do you see? HUGE letters proclaiming "16-BIT". Advertising rom sizes would be confusing and someone may have even been sued for fraud.
Even if the consumer did know what a bit or a byte was, consider this:
The normal NES game(Mapper 4, MMC3) came with about 128KB of both PRG and CHR ROMs(sometimes a little more or less, like 128/64 or 128/256, but it stayed in that range).
The Macintosh, which was released WELL before the hey-day of the NES had 512KB in ROM(earliest models had 128K but could be altered to carry 512K) and 400K(360K IBM formatted for you IBM buffs) floppy drives, or even 800K(720K, IBM formatted) drives, which could store games.. That was 1984-86.
The Commodore 64 Computer used floppy disks that could be even larger(1.2M if I remember right for mine). That was in 1982.
Even in 1989, when the MegaDrive came out, most games were 512K, the same size as that Macintosh unit in ROM, still less than that 7 year old Commodore's floppy disks(which I am using because those were used to store games), and equal to the biggest NES ROM size of 256K/256K.
PCs were using 30-40 MB hard disks by this time as well, and rumors of the Play Station, a supposed CD peripheral to the Super Famicom(we know what happened there though, funniest lawsuit in gaming history next to Tengen Tetris) could store a whole CD of data as early as 1991.
Would you advertise that your games had so little memory? I wouldn't...
