Memory Units

[allenshock]

Memory Units

I read somewhere that one MU in Cyberpunk 2020 = 25 MB of srorage space. By that measure, my wife's Kindle Fire has 328 MU Or is MU more like RAM, not hard drive space?

Allen

 

[Sardukhar]

Hokay. Netrunning I'm a little weak on,not having enjoyed crossword puzzles. Heh. Lil datafortress joke there.

An MU is a, originally, arbitrary unit of measurement. It defines how much of a certain kind of media your device(s) can hold. Ten hours of video, 1 hour of VR, 20 Daemon programs, whatever.

Now, when Mike and Co. were writing this, they were guessing at how much memory it would -take- to hold, say, 10 hours of HD media. Or a near-Ai program called a Succubus that does..things..in the Net. For you. Yeah. Anyway, they were guessing what those would need in terms of memory/storage space.

They guessed low. As most of us know, modern memory -and- storage demands keep going up, the latter more than the former in many ways. 1080p HD, uncompressed audio, and never mind the crazy complexity a program like a Daemon will need when it can do what Cyberpunk 2020 daemons can do.

So MU is a game term, like Humanity. I can't recall if they stuck an actual MB value on it - I think they did, in a sidebar - but it's horribly out of date for that now.

 

[allenshock]

I hear ya...an MU is just an MU best to treat it as an abstraction.

how much space would a 10 hour HD video take up for real? I'm thinking probably 4+ GB personally, but I am not knowledgeable about these things.

Allen

 

[Sardukhar]

Depends on a lot of things, really. Codecs used, degree of "HD", so on. If you were using something like Xvid library, which used Mpeg4, you could get by with "fairly" HD and good sound for anywhere from 4gigs or so to 7 gigs. 7 gigs is more likely if you want anything like good quality video and audio, though. Changing bit rate and resolution really affects those values.

Now if you want less compression in either your audio or your video, you'd be looking at dozens to many dozens of gigabytes, but that just depends on how fussy you are as to your standards and compression rate.

 

[allenshock]

It looks like if we assume that 1 MU = 25 gigabytes, we get a size that can actually hold 10 hours of compressed HD video. That makes a certain amount of sense. Of course that means an MU can store a lot more regular data than before but I somehow don't see that as a big problem

Allen

 

[TheWanderingJewels]

luckily in V3, the MU concept kinda went away. not it's more of how much active memory you have to run things efficiently, than anything else

 

[ad1066]

When Mike & co wrote 2020, there was a serious scarcity issue when it came to storage. You had floppies ("I've got 1.44 MB of porn on this bad boy!") and your hard drive (lucky to get 40 MB in 1990), CD-ROMs weren't common until a couple of years later.

We're really past all that now. There are so many options, hard drive prices are dropping, USB thumb drives put even DVDs to shame, let alone CDs. Then there's stuff like Dropbox.

In game terms, I wouldn't even bother to measure things like storage. It's like WanderingJewels said, it's more about how many things can you run simultaneously.

-- Ben

 

[allenshock]

luckily in V3, the MU concept kinda went away. not it's more of how much active memory you have to run things efficiently, than anything else

That does make sense but I'm afraid of getting eviscerated if I use stuff from v3 given responsesI have seen to it <g>. But that may be the best way to go.

 

[TheWanderingJewels]

I get that a lot. I used the living city and the Edger stuff, along with a Fuzion of my own ideas and it went over pretty well.


that and the Agents in V3 were a logical extension of modern smart phone tech and wireless cable witha bunch of other things rolled into one

 

[allenshock]

Agreed. Agents will definitley see use, replacing the cell phones as given. More wireless is also a good thing.

Allen