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posted by Fnord666 on Friday April 24 2020, @01:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the impressive dept.

A Jaw-Dropping Demo In Only 256 Bytes:

"Revision" is probably the Olympics of the demoscene. The world's best tiny graphics coders assemble, show off their works, and learn new tricks to pack as much awesome into as few bytes as possible or make unheard-of effects on limited hardware. And of course, there's a competition. Winning this year's 256-byte (byte!) competition, and then taking the overall crowd favorite award, was [HellMood]'s Memories.

If you watch it in the live-stream from Revision, you'll hear the crowd going (virtually) wild, and the announcer losing his grip and gasping for words. It's that amazing. Not only are more effects put into 28 bytes than we thought possible, but there's a full generative MIDI score to go with it. What?!?

But almost as amazing is [HellMood]'s generous writeup of how he pulled it off. If you're at all interested in demos, minimal graphics effects, or just plain old sweet hacks, you have your weekend's reading laid out for you. [HellMood] has all of his references and influences linked in as well. You're about to go down a very deep rabbit hole.

Video (2m).


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by YeaWhatevs on Friday April 24 2020, @01:39AM (2 children)

    by YeaWhatevs (5623) on Friday April 24 2020, @01:39AM (#986336)

    No friggin way

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @02:25AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @02:25AM (#986358)

      Or in the words (repeated about 70 times) of the announcer in the livestream, “WHAT THE HELL??!!”

      That is perhaps the most amazing virtuosic thing I’ve seen on the internet in the past year. Holy shit. And it just keeps going...

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 24 2020, @03:25AM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday April 24 2020, @03:25AM (#986378)

      256 is 16x16, these demos have been developed over 30+ years and a lot of them have been optimized down below 32 bytes each, some below 16, and when you combine them there are additional memory savings.

      Impressive as hell? Yes. But, this is hand coded assembly, refined for 30 years with no other purpose than to do the most impressive stuff you can with the fewest bytes of code possible.

      "in the day" moire patterns were a favorite trick to make a simple for loop fill a screen with interesting patterns. These demos use similar pattern replication to make a few instructions appear to do a lot.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @01:45AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @01:45AM (#986339)

    This reminds of the one-line BASIC code contest.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @03:13AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @03:13AM (#986376)

      Reminded me of the immortal MIT AI Lab HAKMEM memorandum.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Friday April 24 2020, @02:03AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday April 24 2020, @02:03AM (#986346) Journal
  • (Score: 2) by crafoo on Friday April 24 2020, @02:58AM

    by crafoo (6639) on Friday April 24 2020, @02:58AM (#986371)

    Really impressive. His wiki writeup is a very good read too if your into this kind of thing.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @03:02AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @03:02AM (#986375)

    This looks like the kind of thing an AI could do. Let it loose and try to figure out WTF it's done later. See this [damninteresting.com] to have your mind blown.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday April 24 2020, @08:49AM (3 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday April 24 2020, @08:49AM (#986422) Journal

    Welcome to code golf. I've dabbled in it. I implemented the classic arcade game Pong in 62 bytes of code (x86), and didn't win the contest. The winner did it in 50 bytes.

    • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @01:02PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @01:02PM (#986454)

      Aww, I made the world's smallest violin for you (62 mm).

  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @03:10PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @03:10PM (#986497)

    I tried it on Windows 10. It locked up with a buffer overflow, my dog died, my cat is walking on the ceiling, and my wife looks like she needs an exorcist.

    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @04:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @04:29PM (#986536)

      Besides the OS issues, how was the demo?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @08:40PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @08:40PM (#986675)

    Who many bytes of JS would that require to duplicate?

  • (Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday April 24 2020, @09:06PM (5 children)

    by Osamabobama (5842) on Friday April 24 2020, @09:06PM (#986686)

    Not only are more effects put into 28 bytes than we thought possible

    That '8' should be a superscript.

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    Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 24 2020, @10:42PM (4 children)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday April 24 2020, @10:42PM (#986729) Journal

      fixed

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      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday April 26 2020, @12:43AM (3 children)

        by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 26 2020, @12:43AM (#987152) Homepage Journal

        How do you get nested subscripts on soylent news?

        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday April 26 2020, @12:47AM (2 children)

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday April 26 2020, @12:47AM (#987155) Journal

          222

          2<sub>2<sub>2</sub></sub>

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          • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday April 26 2020, @11:36AM

            by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 26 2020, @11:36AM (#987249) Homepage Journal

            Thanks.

            That's something I should have known ... It's HTML after all, but I didn't. Now I can rewrite my John Baez started counting story to use ordinary HTML instead of Mathjax. I'll go script-free on that.

            pdf version on http://topoi.pooq.com/hendrik/ord.pdf [pooq.com]
            But html would be better.

            -- hendrik

          • (Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday April 26 2020, @08:45PM

            by Bot (3902) on Sunday April 26 2020, @08:45PM (#987359) Journal

            GGGrrreeeaaattt TTThhhiiinnnkkkiiinnnggg, PPPaaalll!!!

            Thank you for the idea! In the interest of the advancement of Computer Science, here's the source code.


            #!/bin/bash
                while true
            do read -s -n1
            echo -n "$REPLY$REPLY$REPLY"
                done

            All in less then 256 bytes of perfectly indented and, let's say, self-evident code.

            You may want to adjust some lameness filters next :P

            --
            Account abandoned.
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