[quote name='Strell']I doubt this is required. When you compress a game down to DS screen sizes and use better audio technology, I'm guessing you could get the total required memory down to a fraction of what it used to be.
I don't know how big DS carts can get, nor do I know how much it increases the price to have bigger ones. I'm just hazarding a guess that with FF7, for example, I'd think you could get away with a one-cart game.
It was 4 discs, yeah? But how much of that was redundant data that is the same across all four? I bet once you eliminate that, you get to, oh, 1.5-2 GBs of data. And with audio and video compression I bet you can cut that in half.
But really, someone with better technical knowledge than me could answer this better than I could.[/QUOTE]
Oh, it can be far smaller than that. We dissected this a few times when FFVII as a download for the PSP, IIRC, was a repeating topic.
1) Redundant audio tracks comprising a major portion of each CD.
2) Audio was Red Book AKA CD Audio. No compression whatsoever. In AAC or WMA the FFVII soundtrack could likely be brought in under 100 MB at good quality.
3) The code base and primary art assets (overworld, locations accessible throught most of the game, battle art, especially summons animation sequences) for the main game engine was also redundant acrosss all of the discs. A few megabytes per disc but every bit counts. A megabyte saved is a big win for a DS game.
4) Video compression was wretched. New sequences using higher quality in a modern codec will likely consume less ROM space for the whole game than was used for a single disc of the original.
5) FFIV DS, while not entirely comparable, has many FFVII-like upgrades to the original and is of fairly comparable length. It comes in well under a gigabit aka 128 MB. Torrents for the games are actually under 90 MB.
It seems pretty likely that a DS FFVII, including some improvements on the original, could come in under 256 MB or a 2 GB cart. Expensive as DS games go but less so over time as smaller process nodes are used for mask ROM production. If Square continues producing FF remakes for the DS, a 2 GB cart should be doable for a $40 game by the time they get to FFVII. A bigger question be whether a new handheld platform would be the target by that time.
An interesting counterpoint: Could a good FFVII remake with substantial quality improvements be brought in small enough for XBLA/PSN?