The Atari 2600 only had 128 bytes of RAM total… yet developers still managed to bring Space Invaders to the console. How?
Instead of storing the position and state for every alien individually, programmers used a clever trick: they stored the position of just one alien and mathematically calculated the rest. The only thing they actually needed to track was whether each alien was alive or dead, which only requires one bit per alien.
That means the entire alien formation in Space Invaders could be stored in just 7 bytes of memory.
Early game developers were absolute wizards when it came to squeezing performance out of tiny hardware.
