I 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.
How 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.
yay, another person with a bookmark to webarchive copy of that thread. dune's (Lassi Nikko) post about the making of the music for cdak was equally metal, if a bit too short.
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.
It'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)
I 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.
Reminds 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.
Comanche (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.
Micro 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.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 46.4 ms ] threadIt's fascinating to see that 30 years later someone is still working around its source code.
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.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150112121832/https://www.pouet...
(for completeness, cdak pouet/download page: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=55758 - youtube capture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCh3Q08HMfs)
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
[1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-3784-6
If we could train AI to do it, it might be a revolution in software performance.