March of progress…

It’s 1993, and Super Frog is released for the Commodore Amiga.

The base model, the Amiga A500, had 512KB of memory which was shared between system, graphics, and sound sub-systems. The Motorola 68000 CPU ran at ~7.1MHz. Super Frog came on three 880KB floppy-disks – although one of these was dedicated to the opening and closing animations.

It’s 2013, and Super Frog HD is released for a variety of Operating Systems running on Intel x86-based computers.

The minimum requirements to run the game are a 1.8GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, and 128MB of dedicated Graphics Memory. Super Frog HD now takes 90MB of disk space.

This would suggest that in 20 years, it takes 250 times more processing power and 4000 times more memory to play the same game… although hopefully at a slightly higher resolution than the 320×256 with 32 colours of the original!

(In all fairness, the original game ran directly on the system’s hardware, whereas the modern remake runs on top of one of three complex, modern Operating Systems)