I thought it would be sent off… I was hoping to get more input from others on the subject… ANYONE??
The demos are impressive, but ultrafilter is substantially correct; what appears to be a magnificent feat of packing huge amounts of graphics into a tiny file is actually not quite what it seems; the forms that you see on screen (probably the music too) are procedurally generated; there’s probably not a single bitmap stored in the program at all.
That isn’t to say that it soesn’t impress or isn’t damn clever and highly artistic, but it isn’t necessarily the feat of file-packing that it might appear to be.
I will bet you ANY amount of money that you couldn’t write a program any more efficiently in x86 assembler than a decent programmer could in c with gcc, or c++ with MS Visual Studio. The compiler is so much better than all but the VERY best assembly writers, and they’re just as good as the best. There are so many tweaks that the compiler will write better code 99.9% of the time.
Well, what I remember in my coding days was that you could indeed program very small programs with real assembler. I made a Pac-Man clone in assembler on my 16K ZX Spectrum. When I used Windows-based C-compilers I noticed it was next to impossible to make a small program because you had to link in all those stupid libraries with lots of features you weren’t the least interested in. I remember thinking at the time that all those programs I had on my hard disk had all linked those same libraries in there, so in essence I had the same routines thousands of times on my disk.
So I think one of the reasons of bloat is the way libraries do not let you be more selective.
With respect to efficiency, I agree that in the end you can’t beat assembler. I remember (but may be wrong) that things like the original Doom were programmed mostly in C but with the parts that were processed a lot actually written in assembler for speed. The thing is a compiler tends to put a lot of data on the stack and retrieve it, when getting in and out of loops and routines. When writing assembler you know exactly what you need and where.
OTHO, if I would be writing games on a PC, I probably wouldn’t hunt down for needless clock cycles anymore, either. But then, I do not program anymore.
As Flymaster alluded to, modern optimizing compilers are as good or better than most programmers when it comes to tweaking assembly. And they’re better at applying large-scale optimizations, which is going to matter more and more for large programs. Furthermore, algorithmic efficiency matters much more than code optimization in terms of producing fast/small code.
I am young, but I happen to know the history of my field, and have spent some time tweaking assembly code.
TTT, modern linkers are a bit more selective, pulling only the necessary code (unless I’m horribly mistaken).
No real link, but we put large components of our railway signalling systems on floppies. All the data and code to let fast moving trains come close to each other without hitting each other is on one floppy.
I know a lot of other embedded systems can be tiny too. Any other embedded geeks out there have examples?
Future Crew appears to be Past Crew. Excerpt from a whois on futurecrew.org below…too bad, as they did some pretty neat stuff back then. How long did “Unreal” run? I’ve probably still got that on a bootable floppy somewhere.
Domain ID:D1773204-LROR
Domain Name:FUTURECREW.ORG
Created On:14-Aug-1998 04:00:00 UTC
Last Updated On:21-Jul-2002 18:54:59 UTC
Expiration Date:13-Aug-2003 04:00:00 UTC
Registrant Name:CONTACT NOT AUTHORITATIVE
Registrant Street1:Whois Server:whois.directnic.com
Registrant Street2:Referral URL:www.directnic.com
Registrant City:N/A
Registrant Postal Code:N/A
Registrant Country:CA
Registrant Email:not@available.org
The moose out front should have told you.
Did you get tricked into responding to a (now-cornfielded) spammer, or did you really have an insight for a poster that hasn’t been here in nearly 20 years?
Option c: I replied to a poster in a 20 year old thread aware that it was a 20 year old thread and after the spammer had already been removed because I thiught the contents of the link was funny.
I actually do miss MIDI files. And Stereo SID files. I actually etched and built a SID cartridge for my Commodore 64 to play stereo SID files.
It’s 2023, and I’m still tuning assembly code.
The tools are better today and thankfully there’s little need to write assembly code completely by hand, but I still have to read it.
Compilers today have comprehensive “intrinsic” support for fast vector instructions (SSE and AVX in their various forms). This gives you access to powerful instructions that the compiler is not good at using, but still depending on the compiler for register assignment and such (which it is generally good at).
C++ templates are very powerful today. They enable writing a bunch of different variants of a function all at once. Say you have a generic function with various features that get toggled on and off: you can have the compiler generate all possible variations, with separate code for each one, enabling it to avoid all runtime branching. It also allows constant folding, which might allow the compiler to pick more efficient instructions and avoid extra memory loads.
It’s often possible to “coerce” a compiler into doing the right thing. They are by no means always optimal. But if you can look at the generated assembly, and spot that it’s doing something stupid, then it’s often possible to “massage” the code until the compiler goes down the good path.
Performance still matters. The reason people can write fast code in slow languages like Python is that the parts that matter have been written in C/C++/CUDA/etc. by people that do care about performance.
As for super-compact demos, I’m partial to this one:
A great song packed into just 256 bytes. It’s smaller than the text description of it. 1/6 the size of this post.
is it me or did the op seem to give up because others didn’t find the same measure of cool awesomeness in the projects like he did ?
Have they gone away ?
I’ve got hundreds of them !
Oh man, we used to play the crap out of that in college.
A friend told me that in about 1992, you could fit a bunch of 640x480 16 color EGA images of naked ladies on a single floppy disk.
Not so much gone away as becoming a niche resource in the provenance of musicians and composers and the like.
Ah… so you meant you miss them as a method of musical entertainment (which
was superseded by mp3) ?
I mainly use them in composing, but i still enjoy listening to them - and you can change
all the sounds !
Back when we were transitioning away from desktops with FDD drives at our business, my associates and I invested (read “wasted”) many hours trying to get the best version of a complete music video on a single 1.44 MB FDD. Of course, we had rules: You had to use our lab test video (“Jenny/867-5309”) in its entirety. No cropping the intro or outro. It could not be changed to a different speed, but you could drop frames. It had to stay in color and stereo. You could reduce the image size, but it had to remain recognizable. The audio track had to stay somewhat musical.
I don’t know who was ahead in the competition when I left, but I turned in some pretty respectable entries at 1.27 MB and 1.18 MB. They sounded and looked just fine as an insert on your computer monitor that played on cheap speakers. In most cases, they were actually just 48 x 36 pixels in size.