> I haven't been able to track down the original date, but it was already around in the early 2000's. I remember reading the original article when working on o

> I haven't been able to track down the original date, but it was already around in the early 2000's. I remember reading the original article when working on our 4k intro Sesamstr [1] for a demoparty in September 1999. (The ELF Kickers [2] changelog lists July 1999 for the initial release.) We wanted to dynamically link libvga.so, which requires some more features of the ELF header to play with. It turns out that the linker hash table can overlap with other parts of the header, to shave off some bytes. As an additional shot of nostalgia, I remember some other sceners (Wedge, Viznut, XeF4?) trying to avoid SVGAlib entirely, so that one could use the smaller "a.out" format. Because one could not simply use movl $0x13, %eax / int $0x10 in Linux, there were some crude attempts to set all the required VGA registers "by hand". I think that required a couple of hundred bytes to pull off. Back then, you could probably get away with not restoring text mode at the end :) [1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1318 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1318 [2] http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/elfkickers.html http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/elfkickers.html