Hacking Roms Question

[brasscorpion]

Hey all 1st post here and glad to have found this site.

I have an Edge coming in from Hong Kong from DX so it will get here in about 10 more days. The tracking number said that it just hit the US on the 2nd.

Anyway, here is my question. I have been a PC gamer all my life (NOT A SINGLE CONSOLE in the house) and now my kids just got a DS lite for X-mas.

I was looking over the quality of some of the games and have investigated a few things. I am baffled that the games average around 50 MB's or so in size. At least that is what the files sizes are reporting.

So is there a thread or a link that someone can guide me too that explains how these little cards pack in so much information and graphics and how they work. Are they all Flash based games? WHat type of memory do the games use. 1 Gig, 2 GIg, 8 Gig flash memory?

As I said I am used to huge 8+ Gig DVD games like Command and Conquer, Bioshock and so on.

Brass

 

[Noitora]

Obviously, the 3D models in DS games don't have that many polygons, hence this saves quite a few space, sprites are sprites, they don't take that much space and music is usually looped every 1 min or so...and sometimes the data in roms is compressed so it saves space (just like compressing files in a zip or sth)

 

[Law]

WHat type of memory do the games use. 1 Gig, 2 GIg, 8 Gig flash memory?

I'm certain it's flash based, but you're overshooting there.

I think the biggest cart out there is 256MB (2048Mb)

 

[lurbi]

I was looking over the quality of some of the games and have investigated a few things. I am baffled that the games average around 50 MB's or so in size. At least that is what the files sizes are reporting.

So is there a thread or a link that someone can guide me too that explains how these little cards pack in so much information and graphics and how they work. Are they all Flash based games? WHat type of memory do the games use. 1 Gig, 2 GIg, 8 Gig flash memory?

DS games are stored on ROMs (not flash rom) and there is a small Flash or SRAM chip to save savegames.

The size of the ROM chip is the size of the game.
Actually as rom chips are only being made in certain sizes the rom is usually a bit larger than the game.
Eg. your game is 100MB, than you will have to use a 128MB ROM, as the next smaller 64MB ROM is too small to store your game. (rom file trimming, is actually cutting out those unnecessary empty space from the end of the rom file)

largest DS games are 256MB (== 2048 mbit)
when comparing the size take into account how small the resolution of the DS is, and that the 3d models used are usually much simpler and smaller.
Another thing is that videos are usually used little, as they would take up too much of the ROM space. (compare eg with PSP which has storage media which can store 1.7 GB)