Didn't run it (yet) but it looks nice. Great that some people are still able to optimize code! I'm wondering if this would run on actual hardware (VGA + a sound card supporting MPU401 emulation)
That domain is such a blast from the past for me. I spent so many hours working on projects with free webhosting as a teen!
dang/HN: this domain should probably be added to the list where the subdomain is shown next to the title, since subdomains are users' webspaces. (Might be a good candidate for the public suffix list: "[DNS labels] under which Internet users can (or historically could) directly register names".)
This takes me back to the NES era, where developers squeezed entire worlds into a few kilobytes of ROM. What blows my mind here is that even the NES had ~40KB of program space — and this entire boss fight, complete with sprite animation, scrolling landscape, and MIDI music, fits in 256 bytes. The NES ROM header alone is 16 bytes. Incredible work.
Hate to be that guy, but I just can't help it: this is an impressive demo, but for me a "boss fight" is something interactive, which this program obviously isn't. That's probably the reason why the title of the article is (now?) simply "Endbot", while the name of the HTML file is (still?) "A_whole_boss_fight_in_256_bytes.html".
My favorite SNES game (Uncharted Waters 2) is a 2MB ROM.
I think about that every time I send a screenshot. The depth, complexity, and audiovisual beauty of that game stuffed into a space roughly a few times larger than a capture of my 1440p monitor in 2026.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 31.8 ms ] threaddang/HN: this domain should probably be added to the list where the subdomain is shown next to the title, since subdomains are users' webspaces. (Might be a good candidate for the public suffix list: "[DNS labels] under which Internet users can (or historically could) directly register names".)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKLhH_ANwIc
https://parkertomatoes.github.io/v86/?type=com&content=aACgB...
The "silent" version is only 219 bytes
A new version that adds new features into
the remaining bytes is in the works
I think about that every time I send a screenshot. The depth, complexity, and audiovisual beauty of that game stuffed into a space roughly a few times larger than a capture of my 1440p monitor in 2026.