64KB Demo's How?!?

[BoardBonobo]

If I remember correctly, R J Mical managed to fit a fully multi-tasking semaphore based operating kernel in just 16k of code in the Amiga ROM. That's good coding

 

[Colourless]

There's no cheating in that 16 Byte demo. Just sets up the VGA mode 13h and continuely loops updating the frame buffer.

 

[legendCNCD]

heh

Hello. Actually theres quite few games which have been code-written by ex-democoders.. to name few: Messiah, Rally Trophy...

Fresh, to correct.. small ones are called intros (kb size), bigger are called demos

 

[Remage]

AFAIK they usually use UPX, so unpacked size could be say 150-200 Kb.

In today's 64k intros the textures and music (samples) are usually precalculated, or heavily compressed. Textures are generated by various fractal expressions, basic image processing steps, or compressed with lossy image compression algorithms (just like jpeg). Samples can be generated by subtractive- or FM-synthesis, and can be postprocessed with various sound-effect algorithms, such as compression, delay, reverberation, flange, chorus, etc, or compressed with some mp3-like compression method.

And then, the final executable (which can be about 150-200k ) is compressen with UPX, or something similar executable compressor.

The intro mentioned in the first post is exactly called "Heaven 7", and was made by the members of Exceed (one of the best demoscene groups of Hungary).

Btw. an excellent resource site for 64k intros (with user comments and ratings): http://www.pouet.net.

PS: Check "Dreams" by Fresh!mindworkz, with "/t /m" switches in commandline (it saves the music module in .mxm format, and the generated textures in .tga format to the folder it was started from).

If you are _really_ interested in 64k programming, I could show a lot of resource sites for graphics and sound programming.

-- Remage / Fresh!mindworkz.

 

[Rambler]

Petty the Hornet archive closed down, it's not as easy to grab any demos anymore.

afaik scene.org's archive is still up and accessible via ftp.scene.org with most of the stuff still there