Aside from you guys derailing the conversation for no comprehensible reason besides just a lack of compassion regarding this game and this community,
Jeez, calm down!
the true reason is because of the size limit on all images in Cave Story. (320 x 240)
Wrong.
For tiles it's 256x240. For NPC primary and secondary spritesheets it's 320x240... but if you use any rects that go outside this limit, instead of the extra space being filled with nothing, your object will no longer render at all.
For all of the spritesheets that are loaded at the start of the game, any reasonable size is allowed. (Bullet.bmp, NpcSym, NpcRegu, etc.)
This is because Pixel probably didn't want massive load times between areas.
every byte matters for those operating systems.
considering I used to get terrible framerate when I ran windows 7.
i use a lower end w7 laptop.
The operating system should have nothing to do with the specs of the relevant computer. However, on Windows 7 you may indeed see far worse performance from two computers same specs, because Windows 7 is quite taxing, especially the Aero theme. (hey, remember all the shit Vista got for that?)
Now, if every
byte mattered Cave Story would not have been able to run at all on systems of the time, because allegedly Pixel used a debug flag to compile it, making all the assembly code extremely verbose and inefficient.
Drives already existed in 1998 that stored multiple gigabytes. And if someone was poorer they could probably still afford a multiple megabyte drive.
I think the best theory as to why Pixel tried to make Cave Story compact like he did is that he wanted it to fit on a floppy disk, as well as not take up a great portion of any user's potentially small drive. (1.5MB on a 40MB drive would feel like quite a bit)
Reminder that some of the earliest videos of Cave Story on youtube and other video sharing websites had people struggling with their framerate.
Screen-capture videos are usually not a good representation of how a game performs. Encoding/writing a video is very taxing. Even for me now, I find it very hard to get Cave Story to run well whilst recording it.
I mean, it probably doesn't help that it uses DDRAW and its only thread besides the main one is the org-player.
Well now, space requirement doesn't matter,
The amount of space people generally have
(due to its decrease in cost over time) and the space requirements for modern games are only getting bigger as they implement more detailed models and textures.