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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: 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.

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