6 ms·

3D animation with sound in 64 bytes of assembler

227 points by pera 7y ago

parkertomatoes 7y ago
In-browser emulation: https://parkertomatoes.github.io/v86/?type=com&content=FBO6MAPzbs0QuE8M5kDi9x9oAKUHuM3M9%2BeJ6IDu9vb2kix%2F9uoCFmwEkjDG9u7UCZydLHSqr%2BvcyTiZRmdRfw%3D%3D https://parkertomatoes.github.io/v86/?type=com&content=FBO6M...
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I got this: > The string contains invalid characters.
  - avian 7y ago
    Works for me on Firefox 60.9.0esr. No sound though.
  - parkertomatoes 7y ago
    Thanks for reporting! What's your browser? I've only tested with a recent Firefox and Chrome on Windows. I know iOS doesn't work but I don't have a means to debug it.
    - lostgame 7y ago
      Same here with Safari 12.1.2 on MacOS 10.14.6, just FYI.
    - knsprgswrstchn 7y ago
      Same here, iOS 12.4.1 Safari
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      I’m using Safari on iOS 13.2. I can help debug I’d you’d like, but I’m no expert ;)
    - mappu 7y ago
      Otter Browser provides an up-to-date Webkit (i.e. not Blink/Chromium) engine on Windows, that replicated a lot of Safari-only bugs for me in the past.
      - parkertomatoes 7y ago
        Thanks for the recommendation!
ben165 7y ago
This demo on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAAuIgjrZWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAAuIgjrZWY
- AndrewOMartin 7y ago
  The 1080p MP4 at that link is 32.5MiB.
rwmj 7y ago
Since this only uses PC hardware and BIOS calls and so doesn't depend on DOS, I turned it into a boot sector which runs in qemu: wget http://oirase.annexia.org/war qemu-system-i386 -hda war Modified source is here: http://oirase.annexia.org/war.S http://oirase.annexia.org/war.S
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  Could you go one level further and get it working with https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/?
- fuzzfactor 7y ago
  Excellent. The submitted file in2war64.com shows only the blue "background" when run from bare-metal booted DOS floppy on a Pentium D (x64 based on dual x86) with its associated Intel graphics hardware. No sound either. Your file "war" is a nice binary, works natively as sector 0 of a floppy disk, with a traditional FDD plugged directly into the legacy FDD parallel connector. On the same hardware. Also works with USB floppy drive, even on a UEFI PC as long as the Legacy/CSM is enabled and Secure Boot is disabled. To use a common USB Flash Drive (UFD) natively instead of a floppy, legacy BIOS can require a partition table to be also present on sector 0 of the removable UFD. This can be effectively added by partitioning (format not needed) after copying "war" to sector 0 of the UFD: from Linux command line: First copy "war" to sector 0 of the UFD, where X is the identifier of your unmounted UFD: (sudo) dd if=/<path to>/war of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1 This overwrites any MBR and partitontable that may already be on sector 0 of the target X UFD; with the functional "war" replacing the MBR, and zeroes replacing the partition table. Only sector 0 is replaced, all other sectors remain unchanged. At this point sector 0 of the UFD is no different from sector 0 of the working floppy disk. Then create a partition on the target X UFD using cfdisk: (sudo) cfdisk /dev/sdX make it primary, full size, bootable, type 0C Only the final portion of sector 0 is altered (leaving the "war" binary intact at the beginning of sector 0), all other sectors remain unchanged. Then the UFD boots natively just like the floppy. Still for UEFI need Legacy/CSM to be enabled and Secure Boot disabled. Still no sound.
abductee_hg 7y ago
demoscene ftw!
Keyframe 7y ago
I was there at Function when it was shown on the big screen, we brought something for c64. At first I expected something else to show up, but then I remembered it was 64 bytes. Sixty four bytes! 256byte scene is insane. I've noticed recent 256b releases are high res. Not sure how they do it, definitely not 13h. Anyways, this 256b still takes the cake: https://youtu.be/eYNoaVERfR4 https://youtu.be/eYNoaVERfR4
- peterkelly 7y ago
  My cynicism about the widespread disregard for software bloat in the industry is tempered whenever I see stuff like this. Ask a javascript developer to do this and they'll end up with 1500 npm dependecies with an oddball collection of incompatible React plugins, 3d visualisation frameworks, and a codebase that'll be incompatible with the latest and greatest versions of all of these six months from now. Yeah I know assembly language isn't a sensible choice for all but a tiny specialized niche of projects, hardware/bandwidth is far cheaper than developer time and so on but it's still refreshing to see people doing this kind of thing just out of pure passion.
  - K0SM0S 7y ago
    A little OT but this is why I fell in love with Go (Golang) I think. There's something about the elegance of concise programs written in simple languages. The 1500 npm dependencies problem you speak of is exactly what I expect to never even see, let alone have to deal with, in the Go ecosystem. It's not exactly surprising coming from one inventor of UNIX and C (Ken Thompson) and Rob Pike, two greats from Bell Labs, but when I heard that the creator of NodeJs had ditched that to go work in Go, now that I registered loud and clear. After seeing for myself, I can understand. Go is a wonder, truly, and such a treat for systems (from sysadmin to CI/CD passing by performance, readability and safety). Something like Js can only eventually collapse on itself, when there's a better alternative. I mean, we could just as easily bundle a Python interpreter in browsers (to name just one candidate), Js is the frontend bible written in stone only because we keep it this way. Progressive apps are already showing a way between browsers and OS and I expect this line to get ever more blurry as virtualization (containers etc) continues its re-imaging of the entire computed infrastructure.
lscotte 7y ago
A go binary to do the same thing would be at least 50MB. ;-)
- Intermernet 7y ago
  You can write plan 9 assembly straight into go. I'm not sure if it would work, and it sort of defeats the purposes of go, but it wouldn't be 50mb.
rudolfwinestock 7y ago
Here's another 64-byte demo by the same hacker. https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=78044 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=78044 I saw it discussed on Lobsters. https://lobste.rs/s/lpnlyd/tiny_64_bytes_ms_dos_ray_tracer https://lobste.rs/s/lpnlyd/tiny_64_bytes_ms_dos_ray_tracer
d-d 7y ago
As a programmer the demoscene has always fascinated me, but I don't know if I can handle that rabbit hole.
raverbashing 7y ago
One sad part of the obsolescence of "classical" BIOS is the loss of access to basic functionality like simple graphics modes. Of course it's one downside among many upsides but I think there's a point to having a simpler interface to allow stuff like this With 64 bytes you can't even initialize a window on Linux or Windows.
- squarefoot 7y ago
  This is where small embedded devices come handy. Any small cheap board with video output can be turned into a powerful demo (and games) playing machine, at 1/50 or less the cost of hardware in the demoscene era.

227 points by pera 7y ago

In-browser emulation: https://parkertomatoes.github.io/v86/?type=com&content=FBO6MAPzbs0QuE8M5kDi9x9oAKUHuM3M9%2BeJ6IDu9vb2kix%2F9uoCFmwEkjDG9u7UCZydLHSqr%2BvcyTiZRmdRfw%3D%3D https://parkertomatoes.github.io/v86/?type=com&content=FBO6M...

saagarjha 7y ago
I got this: > The string contains invalid characters.
- avian 7y ago
  Works for me on Firefox 60.9.0esr. No sound though.
- parkertomatoes 7y ago
  Thanks for reporting! What's your browser? I've only tested with a recent Firefox and Chrome on Windows. I know iOS doesn't work but I don't have a means to debug it.
  - lostgame 7y ago
    Same here with Safari 12.1.2 on MacOS 10.14.6, just FYI.
  - knsprgswrstchn 7y ago
    Same here, iOS 12.4.1 Safari
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    I’m using Safari on iOS 13.2. I can help debug I’d you’d like, but I’m no expert ;)
  - mappu 7y ago
    Otter Browser provides an up-to-date Webkit (i.e. not Blink/Chromium) engine on Windows, that replicated a lot of Safari-only bugs for me in the past.
    - parkertomatoes 7y ago
      Thanks for the recommendation!

ben165 7y ago

This demo on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAAuIgjrZWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAAuIgjrZWY

AndrewOMartin 7y ago
The 1080p MP4 at that link is 32.5MiB.

rwmj 7y ago

Since this only uses PC hardware and BIOS calls and so doesn't depend on DOS, I turned it into a boot sector which runs in qemu: wget http://oirase.annexia.org/war qemu-system-i386 -hda war Modified source is here: http://oirase.annexia.org/war.S http://oirase.annexia.org/war.S

MuffinFlavored 7y ago
Could you go one level further and get it working with https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/?
fuzzfactor 7y ago
Excellent. The submitted file in2war64.com shows only the blue "background" when run from bare-metal booted DOS floppy on a Pentium D (x64 based on dual x86) with its associated Intel graphics hardware. No sound either. Your file "war" is a nice binary, works natively as sector 0 of a floppy disk, with a traditional FDD plugged directly into the legacy FDD parallel connector. On the same hardware. Also works with USB floppy drive, even on a UEFI PC as long as the Legacy/CSM is enabled and Secure Boot is disabled. To use a common USB Flash Drive (UFD) natively instead of a floppy, legacy BIOS can require a partition table to be also present on sector 0 of the removable UFD. This can be effectively added by partitioning (format not needed) after copying "war" to sector 0 of the UFD: from Linux command line: First copy "war" to sector 0 of the UFD, where X is the identifier of your unmounted UFD: (sudo) dd if=/<path to>/war of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1 This overwrites any MBR and partitontable that may already be on sector 0 of the target X UFD; with the functional "war" replacing the MBR, and zeroes replacing the partition table. Only sector 0 is replaced, all other sectors remain unchanged. At this point sector 0 of the UFD is no different from sector 0 of the working floppy disk. Then create a partition on the target X UFD using cfdisk: (sudo) cfdisk /dev/sdX make it primary, full size, bootable, type 0C Only the final portion of sector 0 is altered (leaving the "war" binary intact at the beginning of sector 0), all other sectors remain unchanged. Then the UFD boots natively just like the floppy. Still for UEFI need Legacy/CSM to be enabled and Secure Boot disabled. Still no sound.

abductee_hg 7y ago

demoscene ftw!

Keyframe 7y ago

I was there at Function when it was shown on the big screen, we brought something for c64. At first I expected something else to show up, but then I remembered it was 64 bytes. Sixty four bytes! 256byte scene is insane. I've noticed recent 256b releases are high res. Not sure how they do it, definitely not 13h. Anyways, this 256b still takes the cake: https://youtu.be/eYNoaVERfR4 https://youtu.be/eYNoaVERfR4

peterkelly 7y ago
My cynicism about the widespread disregard for software bloat in the industry is tempered whenever I see stuff like this. Ask a javascript developer to do this and they'll end up with 1500 npm dependecies with an oddball collection of incompatible React plugins, 3d visualisation frameworks, and a codebase that'll be incompatible with the latest and greatest versions of all of these six months from now. Yeah I know assembly language isn't a sensible choice for all but a tiny specialized niche of projects, hardware/bandwidth is far cheaper than developer time and so on but it's still refreshing to see people doing this kind of thing just out of pure passion.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  A little OT but this is why I fell in love with Go (Golang) I think. There's something about the elegance of concise programs written in simple languages. The 1500 npm dependencies problem you speak of is exactly what I expect to never even see, let alone have to deal with, in the Go ecosystem. It's not exactly surprising coming from one inventor of UNIX and C (Ken Thompson) and Rob Pike, two greats from Bell Labs, but when I heard that the creator of NodeJs had ditched that to go work in Go, now that I registered loud and clear. After seeing for myself, I can understand. Go is a wonder, truly, and such a treat for systems (from sysadmin to CI/CD passing by performance, readability and safety). Something like Js can only eventually collapse on itself, when there's a better alternative. I mean, we could just as easily bundle a Python interpreter in browsers (to name just one candidate), Js is the frontend bible written in stone only because we keep it this way. Progressive apps are already showing a way between browsers and OS and I expect this line to get ever more blurry as virtualization (containers etc) continues its re-imaging of the entire computed infrastructure.

lscotte 7y ago

A go binary to do the same thing would be at least 50MB. ;-)

Intermernet 7y ago
You can write plan 9 assembly straight into go. I'm not sure if it would work, and it sort of defeats the purposes of go, but it wouldn't be 50mb.

rudolfwinestock 7y ago

Here's another 64-byte demo by the same hacker. https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=78044 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=78044 I saw it discussed on Lobsters. https://lobste.rs/s/lpnlyd/tiny_64_bytes_ms_dos_ray_tracer https://lobste.rs/s/lpnlyd/tiny_64_bytes_ms_dos_ray_tracer

d-d 7y ago

As a programmer the demoscene has always fascinated me, but I don't know if I can handle that rabbit hole.

raverbashing 7y ago

One sad part of the obsolescence of "classical" BIOS is the loss of access to basic functionality like simple graphics modes. Of course it's one downside among many upsides but I think there's a point to having a simpler interface to allow stuff like this With 64 bytes you can't even initialize a window on Linux or Windows.

squarefoot 7y ago
This is where small embedded devices come handy. Any small cheap board with video output can be turned into a powerful demo (and games) playing machine, at 1/50 or less the cost of hardware in the demoscene era.