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Redmoon Calculators
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Retro Game ROM / RAM Budget Calculator

Calculatrice gratuite pour dev rétro homebrew.

Quand l’utiliser

Use when prototyping a homebrew retro game in GB Studio, NESmaker, or SGDK. Surface the budget problem before you build it.

Comparaison

Compiler error messages tell you after the fact. This tool warns you during planning.

Enter your values below. Calculations run locally as you type.

Comment ça marche

Bytes used ≈ tiles × 16 + maps × 1024 + audio tracks × 4096 + code × 4. A coarse but useful planning estimate.

Each system has a fixed ROM capacity — Game Boy 32 KB, NES 128 KB, SNES 1 MB, Genesis 4 MB.

Above the ceiling? Bank-switch your tilesets or compress your audio.

FAQ

How does the estimate work?

Tiles × 16 bytes, maps × 1 KB, audio × 4 KB, code × 4 bytes/line. It's a planning estimate, not a compiled-binary calculation.

Why do GB tilesets have a ceiling?

Game Boy VRAM holds ~384 tiles. Above that, you must bank-swap or share tilesets across screens.

What is a bank-boundary warning?

Older cartridge systems split ROM into fixed-size banks (often 8KB or 16KB), and code or graphics cannot freely cross a boundary without bank-switching logic. The warning flags when your content is about to overflow the current bank.

How much ROM did these systems typically have?

Original Game Boy and NES cartridges commonly ranged from 32KB up to a few hundred KB, while Genesis cartridges scaled into several megabytes. Homebrew tools like GB Studio often impose tighter limits than the hardware maximum.

Exemple concret

Entrée

Game Boy (32 KB), 200 tiles, 8 maps, 6 audio tracks, 500 lines of code.

Sortie

~37 KB used — over budget!

200 × 16 (tiles) + 8 × 1024 (maps) + 6 × 4096 (audio) + 500 × 4 (code) = 35,392 bytes — already over the 32 KB cartridge limit.

Pièges courants

  • Heuristic byte counts — real bytes depend on compression and tooling.
  • Bank switching adds capacity but introduces code complexity.
  • Doesn't model VRAM (separate from ROM) — Game Boy VRAM is the more common bottleneck.

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