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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

#31

Post by flas9sd »

icebraining wrote: post #25
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.

that made me chuckle, judging from the whole idea, it's part of the fun

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

#32

Post by wvh »

yebyen wrote: post #8

Your snake game doesn't even have food for the snake to eat? The snake just grows without eating, until the head collides with the tail somewhere? Pssh, amateur hour... /s (Just kidding this is actually super cool.)

My first thought was to make random sectors of the first hard drive the "food"... For better or for worse, this stuff really brings me back to my teens. Nice job!

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

#33

Post by wtmcc »

makomk wrote: post #26
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.

The compression is basic run-length encoding, leveraging the Perl repetition operator (x), and the property of the Perl print/say functions that they concat items passed in a list before writing to STDOUT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_encoding

https://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html#Multiplicative-Operator...

https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/say.html

https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/print.html

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

#34

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

saagarjha wrote: post #27
narrator wrote: post #6

I remember x86 real mode back in the day. Pretty hideous and hacky compared to what we have now.

> what we have now x86 processors still boot into real mode…

It's my understanding that UEFI actually comes up directly into long mode?

"UEFI firmware performs those same steps, but also prepares a protected mode environment with flat segmentation and for x86-64 CPUs, a long mode environment with identity-mapped paging. The A20 gate is enabled as well."

- https://wiki.osdev.org/UEFI

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

#35

Post by gerdesj »

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.

That said, this is a playable game in around 60 bytes of actual data which is impressive.

.. and way smaller than your comment .

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

#37

Post by mynewtb »

icebraining wrote: post #25
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.

Yeah, not happy about that idiocy (probably 1MB as video) burning through 10% of my monthly bandwidth on the first day of the month...

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

#38

Post by ghamrick »

narrator wrote: post #6

I remember x86 real mode back in the day. Pretty hideous and hacky compared to what we have now.

I grew up (career wise) on CTOS systems with 286/386 processors that could address the full 16MB in protected mode without memory extenders or expanders that were available for DOS back in the day. Also premptive multi tasking. It was a great OS to learn on. more info - https://web.archive.org/web/20080828190425/http://www.byte.c...

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

#39

Post by acutesoftware »

myth_drannon wrote: post #13

If you want to see demos (as in demoscene) in a tweet of 140 characters - https://www.dwitter.net/

nice to see demos in action without running random code - thanks. Demos are without a doubt the best way to show the maths can look cool.

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

#40

Post by amenghra »

vinhboy wrote: post #36
antoineMoPa wrote: post #2

That's the kind of thing I come here for! Tiny hacks of all sorts.

Same. I come here to witness what is basically programming magic to me. I'll need a couple of life times before I can become this skilled.

You can do “magic” with relatively easy things. For example, spend a weekend with https://forthsalon.appspot.com or processing.org and see where you can get to...
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