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A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet

quaxio.com

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Re: A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet

#21

Post by sgillen »

ryandrake wrote: post #15

This is great, and ironically it’s sitting next to another HN article where, in the comments, someone is actually defending a NYT news article that weighs in at 6MB. In a time when most software is filled with superfluous waste and endless layers of abstraction and libraries, it’s nice to see that the art of writing minimal software is not completely lost.

For sure, although as a counterpoint I’ve also seen programmers do the reverse. Spending a lot of effort building bad abstractions to completely minimize code reuse/size, when really we would have been better off with slightly longer code that was clearer and that meshed better with our problem domain.

Re: A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet

#23

Post by reificator »

derrasterpunkt wrote: post #19
reificator wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fair assumption to make, as the difference between Tron and Snake is effectively just single player vs multiplayer.

No it isn't. In TRON you leave a trail behind. In Snake, you grow as you eat and drag your body along the path you crawled. TRON's trail is static, Snakes body is dynamic.

I said effectively.

> TRON's trail is static, Snakes body is dynamic.

And that difference only exists to support the single player vs multiplayer dynamic. If Snake left a Tron tail then it would be a very short, unfun experience. If Tron didn't leave a permanent trail then matches would last too long.

Re: A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet

#25

Post by icebraining »

ryandrake wrote: post #15

This is great, and ironically it’s sitting next to another HN article where, in the comments, someone is actually defending a NYT news article that weighs in at 6MB. In a time when most software is filled with superfluous waste and endless layers of abstraction and libraries, it’s nice to see that the art of writing minimal software is not completely lost.

Further irony: this page weighs over 30MBs, thanks to a huge GIF that is arguably not necessary for the article.

Re: A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet

#26

Post by makomk »

barbegal wrote: post #4

I was confused as to how you could represent a bootable CD image in printable characters. It turns out that you can't. This is a tweet of a perl script which creates a cd.iso file that you can then boot from. The perl script significantly decompresses the data in the tweet. That said, this is a playable game in around 60 bytes of actual data which is impressive.

It's pretty light compression from what I can tell - basically just squashing down runs of nulls to a single count.

Re: A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet

#30

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

barbegal wrote: post #4

I was confused as to how you could represent a bootable CD image in printable characters. It turns out that you can't. This is a tweet of a perl script which creates a cd.iso file that you can then boot from. The perl script significantly decompresses the data in the tweet. That said, this is a playable game in around 60 bytes of actual data which is impressive.

Took me a second to figure out after looking at the assembly that it's possible because of base64.
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