It's common knowledge that the original "330 Mega" of the NeoGeo system is that it could play games that were up to the size of 330 megs. Of course, that barrier was later broken with games in the Metal Slug and King of Fighters series that were well past that size.
Now, the question that has resurfaced recently is of course... what is this "megs"? Does it refer to megabytes or megabits? For some technical background, 8 bits make up one byte. Mega generally refers to 1,024. So one megabyte is 1,024 bytes (2^10). A megabyte is written as MB while megabit is mb or, preferrably, mbit. A recent link posted http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Bay/3906/gamelord.htm talks about an advertisement/insert that appeared in the early 90s that dealth with this issue. A quote from this link:
Besides the fact that the quote is as close as you can get to an irrelevant comparison, I think the author is quite wrong. Top Player's Golf is indeed '62 Megs' but it's not megabytes... It's 62 megabits (which puts it at about 7.75 MB in size). If Top Player's Gold was 62 megabytes, it would be larger in size than Doom 2 and Quake combined. If King of Fighters games were in the size range of 600-700 megabytes, they would have as much data as a lot of today's PC games which feature video and more detailed levels and art. Although King of Fighters is impressive, they don't rival (in sheer data size) games like Unreal Tournament.
However, I don't have any concrete knowledge. If anyone here can for a fact say what's what and rectify me/us, then please feel free to post.
As a final aside, I wouldn't rely too much on SNK press. This may have been produced by technically inept PR types (which every game company employs) or liars out to boost the specs of their system (ditto for most).
Now, the question that has resurfaced recently is of course... what is this "megs"? Does it refer to megabytes or megabits? For some technical background, 8 bits make up one byte. Mega generally refers to 1,024. So one megabyte is 1,024 bytes (2^10). A megabyte is written as MB while megabit is mb or, preferrably, mbit. A recent link posted http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Bay/3906/gamelord.htm talks about an advertisement/insert that appeared in the early 90s that dealth with this issue. A quote from this link:
Besides the fact that the quote is as close as you can get to an irrelevant comparison, I think the author is quite wrong. Top Player's Golf is indeed '62 Megs' but it's not megabytes... It's 62 megabits (which puts it at about 7.75 MB in size). If Top Player's Gold was 62 megabytes, it would be larger in size than Doom 2 and Quake combined. If King of Fighters games were in the size range of 600-700 megabytes, they would have as much data as a lot of today's PC games which feature video and more detailed levels and art. Although King of Fighters is impressive, they don't rival (in sheer data size) games like Unreal Tournament.
However, I don't have any concrete knowledge. If anyone here can for a fact say what's what and rectify me/us, then please feel free to post.
As a final aside, I wouldn't rely too much on SNK press. This may have been produced by technically inept PR types (which every game company employs) or liars out to boost the specs of their system (ditto for most).
