Super Mario 64 was on an 8 megabyte cartridge

it's wild to think of how small these games are and how large they would be if made today

@Felthry I think the max texture size on the N64 helped a lot

you just can't put a lot of textures in your game

@noiob Oh absolutely, you compare it to PS1 games and the biggest difference is textures and sound; that's where all that massive 650 megabyte CD space went to

@Felthry RE2 was a lot of work compressing the sound and videos especially

the PlayStation version is on two 700MB CDs (though it would've fit on one)

@noiob Huh, why'd they put it on two then? Just to make it seem like there was more content than there was, or just because they didn't realize it'd fit on one or something?

@noiob (I know a lot of single-disc ps1 games were released in the wider multi-disc case because people associated more discs with more quality)

@noiob (or at least more content)

@Felthry there was some mistake that forced them to use two, and also it made the game look cooler I think, with one disc per character (I think they even had portraits on them)

@noiob oh yeah that's a neat thing you can do with multiple discs!

reminds me of the Suikoden 2 soundtrack, which was in two volumes and had the two main characters on the cover art

@Felthry neat! RE2 basically has the discs as the character select screen, you play the story from the pov of the character you choose, then you pop in the other disc and play it again to find out what the other person's been up to (you have to do a lot of the same puzzles again but eh, the game isn't that long anyways)

@noiob oh, that's really interesting!

@Felthry so the discs contain basically the same room and texture files but different sound files (it's fully voiced)

@Felthry notably, RE2 for the N64 can run at higher resolutions than the PSX one