If you've ever played 7 Cities of Gold, you remember that the map felt HUGE. It seemed to take forever, exploring an unknown continent, wondering if your men were going to starve. Rejoicing when you finally rounded the continental cape and began sailing north up the western coast.
I took a glance at the map today, and it seems that it's not as memory intensive as it looks. I suspect this map renders each piece of topographic data, except for the rivers. The continental mass in this example is something on the order of 40 pixels wide, maybe 80 pixels tall, and only four colors. If that represents a third of the total height (240 pixels?) and maybe it's 100 pixels wide, and each pixel is 2 bits, then that's 240 x 100 x 2 = 48000 bits = 6K for the base map.
(Looking closer, the map is actually more detailed than that, so it's larger than the measly 6K... looks like the Big Map has 1 block averaging out 4x4 actual map pixels, so total map size is 6 x 4 x 4 = 96K. Which is more like it, since that plus native data would take up most of a diskette.)
It still astounds me.
