Wow. Just wow. One can only imagine the amount of hard work and sweat that was put into making this possible. And the pride of developers when it actually worked and the game has become a success. Great story.
What was surprising is the lengths they went to to make things fit. A solver? Wow. My problem was relatively straight forward in comparison: just bit packing and silly amounts of code reuse: Hey, these two completely unrelated routines have the same 7 byte sequence; can I make it common?
Fun times, I miss projects like that.
A little more than a year ago I was working on a very space-constrained device: only 2kb of program flash (an attiny23 for those curious). I had to use libusb with this, which ate up a huge portion of that space. My first shot at the main program put me over the limit by almost 500 bytes. By the time I was done, I had packed the program + the usb lib into the program flash with 4 bytes to spare.
Man, was that fun.
The character of Mew was meant to be referenced through the story, but not actually catchable. Considering that you can only get Mew by exploiting bugs in the game, it's pretty believable that it wasn't added above the radar.
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mew_(Pok%C3%A9mon)#In...
Besides some of the features, there is no way in hell a Commodore 64 would be able to handle the textures, input, and UI of an app like that.
And while you may think that those things are useless, to the overwhelming majority it's the reason why they use that app at all.
Besides, why not use 33MB of memory? I think the number of people that would actually benefit from being able to have 30MB more memory (while using the clock app) on their Android devices is literally 0. Plus being able to be somewhat wasteful with memory provides tons of benefits. It speeds development time, it reduces CPU usage via caching (which reduces battery consumption), it allows higher res textures and a nicer UI, it allows easier-to-maintain code, and tons of other little benefits.
Multi-touch is in the system libraries, shadows and faux-3d layering and animations, too, the alarm system and every timezone imaginable is in the system, automatic home time is in the system.
The app uses 33MB of storage on disk. Only the app, none of the above mentioned libs.
The Facebook app is nowadays 159MB. That’s 120 floppies. For a single app.
Also, the Facebook app (on my Android device at least) is 40.36MB...
But accounting for assets, multi-language translations, functionality, and the fact that it contains a bunch of multi-platform code (multi platform meaning Android with Google services, android with Amazon's stuff, Android with none of that, etc... which means it cant depend on a lot of "system" libraries that might not be there), and more then 40mb isn't even that bad. That being said the Facebook app is a bit of an outlier, with most apps being in the 5MB range.
This app already has over 8MB storage space and 34MB RAM. And the app has only 5 images overall in it, uses no Google services, and has only about 25k LOC.