5 ms·
MARS.EXE → COM (2021)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- HourOrTwo 1y ago[dead]
- reconnecting 1y agoI remember when I saw MARS.EXE for the first time on my 386. That was something absolutely unimaginable for real-time graphics. Pure magic! It's fascinating to see that 30 years later someone is still working around its source code.
- dvh 1y agoHave you also tried to reach the end?
- reconnecting 1y agoOf course, that was the first intention, to get to the end. I remember as a child, I had spent a lot of time on this, but perhaps the direction was wrong. (-:
- richardfey 1y agoIt's endless right?
- reconnecting 1y agoSure, it was endless. Here is "making of" from author. https://www.pouet.net/prod_nfo.php?which=4662 https://www.pouet.net/prod_nfo.php?which=4662
- rwmj 1y agoI remember when the demo came out (I didn't even know it was called a "demo" at the time). We gathered around it running on one of the lab PCs. It was quite unbelievable that something like it could be done in such a tiny executable.
- reconnecting 1y agoYeah, I had exact the same fellings.
- feiss 1y agosame feeling
- baal80spam 1y agoBeautiful. For comparison: In Windows 11, Notepad's size, referring to the disk space it occupies, is approximately 25.1 MB according to the Microsoft Store.
- reconnecting 1y agoFor comparison, the size of this HTML page + CSS is larger than MARS.EXE was.
- dcrazy 1y agoThat seems inevitable, given the webpage contains an assembly listing of MARS.EXE. Mnemonics are larger than machine code.
- reconnecting 1y agoI meant the source of this page, including the transparent pixel image and the logo.
- GuB-42 1y agoHow did it get that big? On my Windows 10, notepad.exe is 196 kB, I remembered it being under 100 kB, but it did get a few more features in the last years. Anyways, hard to judge considering that a good part of the original Notepad is likely to be standard Win32 components. Anyways, none of these "mainsteam" apps hold a candle to sizecoding productions. Just look like what comes out of Lovebyte, a demoparty where no production is above 1 kB.
- hypercube33 1y agoI think they moved it to .net, made it a store app, dark mode and copilot ai.
- pixl97 1y agoWin11 notepad has multiple tabs and previous session saving, which is nice. But it also has a bunch of other crap such as copilot integration and it's logged into your Microsoft account.
- skrebbel 1y agoThe explanation is a great read. It reminds me of Unc's amazing explanation of how they did "cdak", possibly one of the best 4k demos ever made: https://web.archive.org/web/20150112121832/https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=7909&page=1 https://web.archive.org/web/20150112121832/https://www.pouet... (for completeness, cdak pouet/download page: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=55758 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=55758 - youtube capture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCh3Q08HMfs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCh3Q08HMfs)
- tetris11 1y agoIve looked for an online dosbox that would let me load the ASM, but weirdly found nothing.
- reconnecting 1y agoHave you tried this one? https://archive.org/details/demoscene_mars-TimClarke https://archive.org/details/demoscene_mars-TimClarke https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=4662 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=4662
- tetris11 1y agoOh wow, really nice -- took me a while to realise that hitting a key exits the program and that it only responds to mouse input
- reconnecting 1y agoDescription from pouet.net and how it works (1) The Mars demo was written by Elixir's resident graphics guru and Head of R & D Tim Clarke in 1993, whilst he was still at school. Freely distributed on the Internet, the demo soon gained legendary status for its ability to generate fractal terrain and render it real time, all with a meagre 5K. As a result Tim was headhunted to work for space agency Lunacorp in Washington for several summers whilst studying at Cambridge University. We recommend running this in DOS mode as it was designed to run on a 386 and may well crash Windows. Remember that this demo was designed for machines that were around in 1993! Use the mouse to move around and press any key to quit. (1) https://www.pouet.net/prod_nfo.php?which=4662 https://www.pouet.net/prod_nfo.php?which=4662
- nopakos 1y agoOne of the first emails I've sent in my life was to Tim Clarke asking how Mars did work and I was so happy he answered! I remember the graph with the stars.
- reconnecting 1y agoI didn't have any access to email at this time, and Mars looked to me like people somewhere out there were playing with real-time generated 3d virtual worlds while I was stuck with Windows 3.1 forever and no one would rescue me.
- Agingcoder 1y agoI remember mouse control - I didn’t expect in a dos application at the time, and it also felt like a waste of space ( I think you had to fiddle with interrupt 33 or something like that to deal with the mouse which was more complicated than basic port reading )
- amiga386 1y agoIt's a classic demo. The question is, how does the size-reduced version perform on an 80386? (as opposed to a multi-gigahertz machine trusting DOSBox to emulate a 386)
- fl0id 1y agoat the end, it says it was at least tested to compile (and presumably run) on real machines.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- phkahler 1y agoI remember seeing this, reading the high level description of how it works, and doing my own implementation in school. Probably in Turbo Pascal on a 486.
- Andrew_nenakhov 1y agoMARS.EXE... Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
- nickdothutton 1y agoReminds me as a kid I spent all my money on a Springer Verlag book on Fractals[1] in the 1988s, and attempted to reproduce some of the forms on a z80 home computer. Very, Very, slowly. [1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-3784-6 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-3784-6
- flockonus 1y agoWould love seeing this running on the web via WASM or similar :)
- shmerl 1y agoI remember poking at it in the binary editor and finding a byte that changed the color palette from red base to green and blue.
- kragen 1y agoDid Mars.exe anticipate Comanche's Voxel Space 3-D rendering algorithm?
- black-adder 1y agoComanche (Maximum Overkill) came out a year before and looked very blocky compared to Mars. I always wondered why there isn't a game based on Mars... Magic Carpet (1994) was awesome though.
- londons_explore 1y agoMicro optimization like this to get big size or speed advantages seems to yield huge results, with the downside that it is hugely human labour intensive. If we could train AI to do it, it might be a revolution in software performance.