7 ms·

A dive into the making of a 64K Intro

320 points by kemenaran 8y ago

guiambros 8y ago
Really well done. It's a bummer that source code are rarely released for demos. For me one of the best of all times is Second Life [1], by Future Crew. Developed in 1993 nonetheless, it was a big breakthrough at the time, with almost 10 minutes of animation, and in early x86 hardware. Source code available [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA [2] http://fabiensanglard.net/second_reality/index.php http://fabiensanglard.net/second_reality/index.php
- christogreeff 8y ago
  Panic was also good. :)
  - guiambros 8y ago
    Panic[1] was awesome too. It launched a bit earlier than Second Reality, but also a classic. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLSmalQyZBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLSmalQyZBU
- laurentlb 8y ago
  Demo source code is not often released, but there are many exceptions. For example, if you're interested in 4kB intros, look at this: https://github.com/in4k https://github.com/in4k Since 4kB intros are typically done in a shader, you can also look at https://www.shadertoy.com https://www.shadertoy.com For Ctrl-Alt-Test specifically, we put our source code on GitHub (but not the most recent productions)[1]. The tool to minify shaders is also on GitHub[2]. So I think you can get a pretty good idea of how we did it. If you have any question, feel free to ask. I can give more details here, or it can be part of a future blog post. [1] https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test [2] https://github.com/laurentlb/Shader_Minifier https://github.com/laurentlb/Shader_Minifier
  - guiambros 8y ago
    Thanks for sharing! Your F – Felix’s Workshop[1] is pretty impressive, and specially for the 64KB category. Thanks for publishing the source code[2] as well. [1] http://www.ctrl-alt-test.fr/productions/f-felixs-workshop/ http://www.ctrl-alt-test.fr/productions/f-felixs-workshop/ [2] https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test/tree/master/F https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test/tree/master/F
- userbinator 8y ago
  Given that the demoscene evolved from the cracking/warez scene, there is an implicit notion that if you want to figure out how something works, you should inspect it yourself with a disassembler.
  - jandrese 8y ago
    Most of those early demos were hand assembled anyway, so the "source code" is a bit of a vague statement. You might be getting a bit more structure/comments in the original .s file but maybe not. Most of those demos required heroic program shrinking to fit in memory, and that's almost always a disaster for readability.
- guiambros 8y ago
  Note: of course I meant "Second Reality" in parent's comment, not Second Life. Philip Rosedale's creation only came 10 years after "Second Reality" demo :)
- pjmlp 8y ago
  That is the whole point of demoscene, how to beat the others by finding the tricks on your own. You need to prove on your own that you have the necessary elite skills to enter a group.
  - skrebbel 8y ago
    That idea is obsolete by at least twenty years. You typically join (or form) a group because you get along with them. I'm in five groups, some with some pretty great releases (not mine), and I'm a pretty shitty graphics coder. In fact your phrasing "elite skills" made me chuckle a bit, it sounds like the kind of thing a 16 year old would say in 1994 :) (no offense intended) I think most people don't release source code because a) it's just not really part of the culture, b) the code is shit and c) people want to make demos, not READMEs. I mean, in the end this is about art and expression as much as anything. Electronic musicians don't usually publish their music software source files either. There is not really any elitism behind this. c) is also why write-ups like this one are so uncommon. (Cool stuff LLB!)
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Well, I was a regular Hugi reader, Nectarine, Assembly, Flipcode, AmiNet...
      - skrebbel 8y ago
        Sounds pretty old-school to me :) Note, I'm not attacking you! What you wrote used to be true. It just hasn't been anymore, for a long time. And, an offtopic sidenote, you're one of my favourite HN commenters. I learn something new or insightful in half of your comments.
        pjmlp 8y ago
        Sure, I got it, just letting you know I lost touch long time ago. :) Thanks for the remark.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  hmm, i think i spotted a certain Wendigo during the credits sequence...
- bcrescimanno 8y ago
  I remember downloading FastTracker II years ago to grab the .mod music files from Second Reality and burn them to CD. The track that starts at time Index 1:54 on that linked YouTube video brings back so many memories. :)
tnolet 8y ago
Deep respect for this. Also humbled looking at my 1 page Vue + Webpack SPA clocking in at about 1mb
- xtrapolate 8y ago
  I've been using this exact comparison, to pitch against web bloat (and bloated technology in general). Some more fantastic demos: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=farbrausch https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=farbrausch
- digi_owl 8y ago
  What we get for being 3+ layers removed from the hardware used.
  - wiz21c 8y ago
    hell yeah, just looking at the length of a stacktrace under our good old Java EE makes me sick (and I'm not even counting the additional calls to query the database) (I understand there's a trade off between productivity and performance, but nonetheless, it's scary)
bdickason 8y ago
I’ve always been impressed by the demo scene but never tried my hand at one because of the insane programming chops needed. What are your top 3 favorite intros that you would recommend watching?
- berbec 8y ago
  I don't have three off the top of my head, but running through the entirety of farbrausch's releases starting with "The Polular Demo" [1] will give you a sense of awe. 1: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9450 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9450
- jsheard 8y ago
  These two 64K intros by Conspiracy are essential viewing: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67106 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67106 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRVTI2y0BBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRVTI2y0BBg http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=75713 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=75713 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE6SZeAhZdM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE6SZeAhZdM Elysian by Logicoma is a favorite too, it's not as visually spectacular but the music makes up for it :) http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=68375 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=68375 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWwNgVwQG1A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWwNgVwQG1A
  - decko 8y ago
    The music part of Elysian is really cool since they wrote a synthesizer and a tool allowing them to make music in Ableton Live (a very popular music production application) and convert it back to code for their demos. Ferris (the guy who wrote most of it) has a video on YouTube explaining how it works and I was absolutely blown away by it.
    - molotovbliss 8y ago
      https://countercomplex.blogspot.com/2011/10/algorithmic-symphonies-from-one-line-of.html https://countercomplex.blogspot.com/2011/10/algorithmic-symp... http://4klang.untergrund.net/ http://4klang.untergrund.net/
AHTERIX5000 8y ago
Another great writeup of making of a 64k: http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/64k_intro.html http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/64k_intro.html
royjacobs 8y ago
I used to do a lot of demoscene stuff as well [1]. I've been trying to get back into it but I've found that all of the software engineering I've done in the meantime has kind of driven the "just get it working" mindset away somewhat. I used to just write code that "happened" to work, more or less. Nowadays I would want to get unit tests in place, make it cross-platform if at all possible and get a nice GUI going for easy tweaking. It's made it impossible for me to get anything done in the limited free time I have :) ideally I'd write it in Rust, but there, too, I am waiting for tooling to catch up. I get the feeling that I'm not so much waiting for the tooling, but I'm using the waiting as a sneaky way of procrastinating and fooling myself... [1] http://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=65 http://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=65
- terhechte 8y ago
  The tooling for Rust is slowly becoming quite good. Intellij + The Rust Plugin is a really good development environment. Other editors with RLS are not as advanced yet though. So if you need an IDE environment for Rust, then Intellij is really good already.
  - royjacobs 8y ago
    Yes, it's getting to a point where it's not really an obstacle anymore. I can even debug on Windows using the latest version of clion, what is the world coming to?
- skrebbel 8y ago
  Go make a demo about it
  - royjacobs 8y ago
    I'm trying :)
    - skrebbel 8y ago
      My suspicion is that this problem you describe is one core reason why "a raymarcher in a single shader" has become such a popular demo platform. Nobody writes unit tests inside shaders, it just.. doesn't make much sense. The environment sort of forces you to stop thinking like an engineer and start thinking like a coder.
Annatar 8y ago
This is the kind of stuff I grew up on, so when I’m critical of the software and the implementations here, the bloat, the unnecessary dependencies, the slowness... this is the standard I judge them against. The mentality and the techniques in the article are applicable to any kind of software. When applied correctly, they make any software small and fast.
- myth_drannon 8y ago
  Well it's for profit software vs hobby just for the love of it. Different goals.
  - vvanders 8y ago
    If your getting paid to work on a 8/16 bit mcu(or low SRAM ARM) same stuff still applies.
    - Twirrim 8y ago
      Sure, but that's a very small fraction of people vs those that don't really face those constraints (not that there isn't value in "thinking small and efficient")
no_identd 8y ago
A note on the architecture from the demo: The vast majority of ancient buildings follows quite simple procedural methods that only very recently got reverse engineered: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Francisco_Javier_Roldan-Medina/publication/283490185_Unraveling_the_Classic_Proportions_Through_the_Anthropometric_Analysis_of_the_Architectural_Heritage_The_Case_of_the_Pantheon/links/563a4dd908ae405111a5841f/Unraveling-the-Classic-Proportions-Through-the-Anthropometric-Analysis-of-the-Architectural-Heritage-The-Case-of-the-Pantheon.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Francisco_Javier_Roldan... (I suspect this method also permits approximating the plastic number [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_number ], but so far it seems nobody has figured out a way to do so yet. I mention this due to the architectural relevance of the plastic number.) I speculate that leveraging this fact could likely permit even more complex architecture in demos. (And, to mention an off topic point, it likely has some relevance for automating UI layouting.)
- arca_vorago 8y ago
  Wow, thanks for these links, I had no idea about plastic number theory in geometry. So cool.
- AlotOfReading 8y ago
  So many issues. First, that paper doesn't claim what you say it does. Second, it's just not a great paper. Even if we accept the sketchy premise, it fails to distinguish overfitting from a successful test. Numbers of the form (a+b*sqrt(2) can approximate almost any number to within 0.03 units, yet there's no discussion of fitting errors to address it. You should not take papers like these as fact.
twic 8y ago
A previous discussion of the source code of a 4K demo, 'Elevated', by Rgba, with a link to a really good dive into it by Iñigo Quilez, who worked on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11848097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11848097
_o_ 8y ago
Well the first optimization would be to roll my own libc (not that hard at all :) ) where i would load api calls by ordinal and only those that i really need (ok, for the sake of compatibility, i would dig them from IAT table based on 16bit hash (folding fnv32) of API name + dll name). Same for all other libraries, everything compiled with agressive optimization (at least /O2). Next step would be to take compiler that is minimizing the bloat, tinyc (https://bellard.org/tcc/ https://bellard.org/tcc/), compiling 32 bit binaries just to save some space. Maybe even go for .com to avoid PE header bloat. At the end compress everything with something like upx, but probably i would roll my own PE compressor. Instead of using functions, the macros would be used, absolutely no classes, #pragma pack(1) all structures (i never tryed what tinyc does :D). Also merging PE sections will save some bytes. Size optimizing is fun and you can learn a lot but it is dying art, probably 99.9999% of todays developers dont understand what I have written in first part (today, you are learning the programming, but very indequately what the OS does, actually typical today programer understands the programing but is clueless what his code does on low level) ... but +1 for anyone that goes into that direction, my boss at my first job was saying that good software fits to one 1.44 floppy but this is today violated by HHLL. Well business wise no need for that unless you are making malware, but still cool.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  On Windows a common approch is just to use Win32 directly, no libc APIs at all. Oh and link them by ordinal.
  - jsheard 8y ago
    Most demoparties forbid linking by ordinal these days, since ordinals tend to change between Windows versions. Importing by hash is the go-to method now. https://in4k.github.io/wiki/import-by-hash https://in4k.github.io/wiki/import-by-hash
    - _o_ 8y ago
      >> ok, for the sake of compatibility, i would dig them from IAT table based on 16bit hash (folding fnv32) of API name + dll name ;)
zaarn 8y ago
If someone is interested in small demoes, I recommend "A Mind is Born", a 256 Byte Demo. It runs for about 3 minutes (IIRC). [ https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/ https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/ ]
srj85 8y ago
Awesome. Thanks for sharing
kwoff 8y ago
I still play https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8 over and over, just for the song, not only because it is 256 bytes, but because it is a compelling song too.

320 points by kemenaran 8y ago

Really well done. It's a bummer that source code are rarely released for demos. For me one of the best of all times is Second Life [1], by Future Crew. Developed in 1993 nonetheless, it was a big breakthrough at the time, with almost 10 minutes of animation, and in early x86 hardware. Source code available [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA [2] http://fabiensanglard.net/second_reality/index.php http://fabiensanglard.net/second_reality/index.php

christogreeff 8y ago
Panic was also good. :)
- guiambros 8y ago
  Panic[1] was awesome too. It launched a bit earlier than Second Reality, but also a classic. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLSmalQyZBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLSmalQyZBU
laurentlb 8y ago
Demo source code is not often released, but there are many exceptions. For example, if you're interested in 4kB intros, look at this: https://github.com/in4k https://github.com/in4k Since 4kB intros are typically done in a shader, you can also look at https://www.shadertoy.com https://www.shadertoy.com For Ctrl-Alt-Test specifically, we put our source code on GitHub (but not the most recent productions)[1]. The tool to minify shaders is also on GitHub[2]. So I think you can get a pretty good idea of how we did it. If you have any question, feel free to ask. I can give more details here, or it can be part of a future blog post. [1] https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test [2] https://github.com/laurentlb/Shader_Minifier https://github.com/laurentlb/Shader_Minifier
- guiambros 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing! Your F – Felix’s Workshop[1] is pretty impressive, and specially for the 64KB category. Thanks for publishing the source code[2] as well. [1] http://www.ctrl-alt-test.fr/productions/f-felixs-workshop/ http://www.ctrl-alt-test.fr/productions/f-felixs-workshop/ [2] https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test/tree/master/F https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test/tree/master/F
userbinator 8y ago
Given that the demoscene evolved from the cracking/warez scene, there is an implicit notion that if you want to figure out how something works, you should inspect it yourself with a disassembler.
- jandrese 8y ago
  Most of those early demos were hand assembled anyway, so the "source code" is a bit of a vague statement. You might be getting a bit more structure/comments in the original .s file but maybe not. Most of those demos required heroic program shrinking to fit in memory, and that's almost always a disaster for readability.
guiambros 8y ago
Note: of course I meant "Second Reality" in parent's comment, not Second Life. Philip Rosedale's creation only came 10 years after "Second Reality" demo :)
pjmlp 8y ago
That is the whole point of demoscene, how to beat the others by finding the tricks on your own. You need to prove on your own that you have the necessary elite skills to enter a group.
- skrebbel 8y ago
  That idea is obsolete by at least twenty years. You typically join (or form) a group because you get along with them. I'm in five groups, some with some pretty great releases (not mine), and I'm a pretty shitty graphics coder. In fact your phrasing "elite skills" made me chuckle a bit, it sounds like the kind of thing a 16 year old would say in 1994 :) (no offense intended) I think most people don't release source code because a) it's just not really part of the culture, b) the code is shit and c) people want to make demos, not READMEs. I mean, in the end this is about art and expression as much as anything. Electronic musicians don't usually publish their music software source files either. There is not really any elitism behind this. c) is also why write-ups like this one are so uncommon. (Cool stuff LLB!)
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Well, I was a regular Hugi reader, Nectarine, Assembly, Flipcode, AmiNet...
    - skrebbel 8y ago
      Sounds pretty old-school to me :) Note, I'm not attacking you! What you wrote used to be true. It just hasn't been anymore, for a long time. And, an offtopic sidenote, you're one of my favourite HN commenters. I learn something new or insightful in half of your comments.
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        Sure, I got it, just letting you know I lost touch long time ago. :) Thanks for the remark.
digi_owl 8y ago
hmm, i think i spotted a certain Wendigo during the credits sequence...
bcrescimanno 8y ago
I remember downloading FastTracker II years ago to grab the .mod music files from Second Reality and burn them to CD. The track that starts at time Index 1:54 on that linked YouTube video brings back so many memories. :)

tnolet 8y ago

Deep respect for this. Also humbled looking at my 1 page Vue + Webpack SPA clocking in at about 1mb

xtrapolate 8y ago
I've been using this exact comparison, to pitch against web bloat (and bloated technology in general). Some more fantastic demos: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=farbrausch https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=farbrausch
digi_owl 8y ago
What we get for being 3+ layers removed from the hardware used.
- wiz21c 8y ago
  hell yeah, just looking at the length of a stacktrace under our good old Java EE makes me sick (and I'm not even counting the additional calls to query the database) (I understand there's a trade off between productivity and performance, but nonetheless, it's scary)

bdickason 8y ago

I’ve always been impressed by the demo scene but never tried my hand at one because of the insane programming chops needed. What are your top 3 favorite intros that you would recommend watching?

berbec 8y ago
I don't have three off the top of my head, but running through the entirety of farbrausch's releases starting with "The Polular Demo" [1] will give you a sense of awe. 1: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9450 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9450
jsheard 8y ago
These two 64K intros by Conspiracy are essential viewing: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67106 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67106 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRVTI2y0BBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRVTI2y0BBg http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=75713 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=75713 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE6SZeAhZdM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE6SZeAhZdM Elysian by Logicoma is a favorite too, it's not as visually spectacular but the music makes up for it :) http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=68375 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=68375 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWwNgVwQG1A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWwNgVwQG1A
- decko 8y ago
  The music part of Elysian is really cool since they wrote a synthesizer and a tool allowing them to make music in Ableton Live (a very popular music production application) and convert it back to code for their demos. Ferris (the guy who wrote most of it) has a video on YouTube explaining how it works and I was absolutely blown away by it.
  - molotovbliss 8y ago
    https://countercomplex.blogspot.com/2011/10/algorithmic-symphonies-from-one-line-of.html https://countercomplex.blogspot.com/2011/10/algorithmic-symp... http://4klang.untergrund.net/ http://4klang.untergrund.net/

AHTERIX5000 8y ago

Another great writeup of making of a 64k: http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/64k_intro.html http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/64k_intro.html

royjacobs 8y ago

I used to do a lot of demoscene stuff as well [1]. I've been trying to get back into it but I've found that all of the software engineering I've done in the meantime has kind of driven the "just get it working" mindset away somewhat. I used to just write code that "happened" to work, more or less. Nowadays I would want to get unit tests in place, make it cross-platform if at all possible and get a nice GUI going for easy tweaking. It's made it impossible for me to get anything done in the limited free time I have :) ideally I'd write it in Rust, but there, too, I am waiting for tooling to catch up. I get the feeling that I'm not so much waiting for the tooling, but I'm using the waiting as a sneaky way of procrastinating and fooling myself... [1] http://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=65 http://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=65

terhechte 8y ago
The tooling for Rust is slowly becoming quite good. Intellij + The Rust Plugin is a really good development environment. Other editors with RLS are not as advanced yet though. So if you need an IDE environment for Rust, then Intellij is really good already.
- royjacobs 8y ago
  Yes, it's getting to a point where it's not really an obstacle anymore. I can even debug on Windows using the latest version of clion, what is the world coming to?
skrebbel 8y ago
Go make a demo about it
- royjacobs 8y ago
  I'm trying :)
  - skrebbel 8y ago
    My suspicion is that this problem you describe is one core reason why "a raymarcher in a single shader" has become such a popular demo platform. Nobody writes unit tests inside shaders, it just.. doesn't make much sense. The environment sort of forces you to stop thinking like an engineer and start thinking like a coder.

Annatar 8y ago

This is the kind of stuff I grew up on, so when I’m critical of the software and the implementations here, the bloat, the unnecessary dependencies, the slowness... this is the standard I judge them against. The mentality and the techniques in the article are applicable to any kind of software. When applied correctly, they make any software small and fast.

myth_drannon 8y ago
Well it's for profit software vs hobby just for the love of it. Different goals.
- vvanders 8y ago
  If your getting paid to work on a 8/16 bit mcu(or low SRAM ARM) same stuff still applies.
  - Twirrim 8y ago
    Sure, but that's a very small fraction of people vs those that don't really face those constraints (not that there isn't value in "thinking small and efficient")

no_identd 8y ago

A note on the architecture from the demo: The vast majority of ancient buildings follows quite simple procedural methods that only very recently got reverse engineered: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Francisco_Javier_Roldan-Medina/publication/283490185_Unraveling_the_Classic_Proportions_Through_the_Anthropometric_Analysis_of_the_Architectural_Heritage_The_Case_of_the_Pantheon/links/563a4dd908ae405111a5841f/Unraveling-the-Classic-Proportions-Through-the-Anthropometric-Analysis-of-the-Architectural-Heritage-The-Case-of-the-Pantheon.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Francisco_Javier_Roldan... (I suspect this method also permits approximating the plastic number [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_number ], but so far it seems nobody has figured out a way to do so yet. I mention this due to the architectural relevance of the plastic number.) I speculate that leveraging this fact could likely permit even more complex architecture in demos. (And, to mention an off topic point, it likely has some relevance for automating UI layouting.)

arca_vorago 8y ago
Wow, thanks for these links, I had no idea about plastic number theory in geometry. So cool.
AlotOfReading 8y ago
So many issues. First, that paper doesn't claim what you say it does. Second, it's just not a great paper. Even if we accept the sketchy premise, it fails to distinguish overfitting from a successful test. Numbers of the form (a+b*sqrt(2) can approximate almost any number to within 0.03 units, yet there's no discussion of fitting errors to address it. You should not take papers like these as fact.

twic 8y ago

A previous discussion of the source code of a 4K demo, 'Elevated', by Rgba, with a link to a really good dive into it by Iñigo Quilez, who worked on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11848097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11848097

_o_ 8y ago

Well the first optimization would be to roll my own libc (not that hard at all :) ) where i would load api calls by ordinal and only those that i really need (ok, for the sake of compatibility, i would dig them from IAT table based on 16bit hash (folding fnv32) of API name + dll name). Same for all other libraries, everything compiled with agressive optimization (at least /O2). Next step would be to take compiler that is minimizing the bloat, tinyc (https://bellard.org/tcc/ https://bellard.org/tcc/), compiling 32 bit binaries just to save some space. Maybe even go for .com to avoid PE header bloat. At the end compress everything with something like upx, but probably i would roll my own PE compressor. Instead of using functions, the macros would be used, absolutely no classes, #pragma pack(1) all structures (i never tryed what tinyc does :D). Also merging PE sections will save some bytes. Size optimizing is fun and you can learn a lot but it is dying art, probably 99.9999% of todays developers dont understand what I have written in first part (today, you are learning the programming, but very indequately what the OS does, actually typical today programer understands the programing but is clueless what his code does on low level) ... but +1 for anyone that goes into that direction, my boss at my first job was saying that good software fits to one 1.44 floppy but this is today violated by HHLL. Well business wise no need for that unless you are making malware, but still cool.

pjmlp 8y ago
On Windows a common approch is just to use Win32 directly, no libc APIs at all. Oh and link them by ordinal.
- jsheard 8y ago
  Most demoparties forbid linking by ordinal these days, since ordinals tend to change between Windows versions. Importing by hash is the go-to method now. https://in4k.github.io/wiki/import-by-hash https://in4k.github.io/wiki/import-by-hash
  - _o_ 8y ago
    >> ok, for the sake of compatibility, i would dig them from IAT table based on 16bit hash (folding fnv32) of API name + dll name ;)

zaarn 8y ago

If someone is interested in small demoes, I recommend "A Mind is Born", a 256 Byte Demo. It runs for about 3 minutes (IIRC). [ https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/ https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/ ]

srj85 8y ago

Awesome. Thanks for sharing

kwoff 8y ago

I still play https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8 over and over, just for the song, not only because it is 256 bytes, but because it is a compelling song too.