![]() By the way, the Genesis has 64 kilobytes of RAM and the maximum size of Genesis carts without expensive extra memory with bank switching shenanigans and the like is 4MB. Without getting into nitty gritty math, a single Act in Sonic Mania would require roughly a MB of space, give or take, just for the level layout data alone. ![]() Also each level has at least three of these rectangular arrays for two foreground planes and at least one background. Sonic Mania, being a modern game on modern hardware with gobs of memory and storage, eschews all of this compacting and just does a straight rectangular array of 16x16 tiles. If you've noticed a lot of repeating terrain that don't quite 100% fit together when playing the old Genesis games, this is why. The level format combined with the chunk definitions keeps things managrable on Genesis hardware but it also inherently limits the flexibility of your level design, as there can only be so much variance since these level chunks are continuously reused. ![]() That doesn't sound like a lot, except that by Sonic 3 levels would routinely go as high as ~20000-25000 pixels wide and ~2000-4000 pixels high. There were at most 255 of these chunks defined for each level so the level layout instead only needed 1 byte per 128x128 pixel section, or about ~6-8 bytes per visible "screen" you see. The way huge sprawling levels were done on the Genesis was that the levels were laid out in chunks that were 128x128 (256x256 in Sonic 1) sized pieces, which themselves were made out of 16x16 tiles. The Genesis doesn't have enough memory to handle the levels from Mania. It wouldn't be a downgrade, it'd completely change the game into something else entirely.
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