Maes
I like big butts!
Posts: 8661
Registered: 07-06 |
@Wagi: did Bill Gates ever say something about 64 KB?
hex11 said:
Well 64 KB was enough RAM for many 8-bit machines, so you'd think 256 KB would also be enough for 32-bit machines, but the bloatage turned out more like an exponential function.
I'd put the "sweet spot" somewhere between 4 and 16 MB: 16 MB was the practical addressing limit of many 16/32 bit machines (286, 68000 etc.), and anything beyong 4 MB was considered "high end" during the late 80s/early 90s for some exotic machines like Sparcstations, Atari TTs, Amiga accelerator cards etc. You could also play practically all MS-DOS games ever conceived, run Windows 3.1, 95, 98 and OS/2 with 16 MB, something that no modern Linux distro is capable of doing (even DSL requires 24 MB for graphics).
But less than 512 KB? Even the venerable Amiga would have had it much worse with that little RAM (remember, no dedicated VRAM on most home computers, and many Amiga games were designed to work better with 1 MB or more). Then again, Doom requires a 4 MB address space to be playable in its full MS-DOS glory without cutting down on resources, so 4 MB is all the memory you'll ever need ;-)
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11-01-11 02:05 
