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In my final year at Uni, I wrote a set of games (admittedly text based) including MasterMind, 3D Noughts and Crosses, Lunar Lander that each ran in under 2K written in Coral66 (mainly because it had macros for all of the machine language instructions so you were effectively writing assembler). The limit of 2K was because that was all that the Uni. allowed for student programs.
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Not anywhere near as dramatic as the 2K you enjoyed, but the first PC game I bought was Epyx ROGUE - and it came on a 160K single-sided floppy. Text base, perhaps, but I was playing the game for the game and not as a media event.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Here[^] is what you can render with a 4k executable (not 4k the video format, 4kb of code). This is realtime calculated, including the music.
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As I mention in a posting below: Rather than picking up a 70 Mbyte video of what can be created by a 4Ki executable, try to find that 4Ki executable!
I find this one on elevated by Rgba & TBC :: pouët.net[^], but unfortunately, it requires DX9, which won't run on Windows 10. (If anyone knows of a way to run it on Win10, please tell!)
In the meantime, pouet.net has lots of Win10 compatible executables, some even smaller than 4Ki. I think Skyline by LJ & Logicoma :: pouët.net[^] (which I also mention in my other post) is one of the better ones.
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Member 7989122 wrote: it requires DX9, which won't run on Windows 10.
Hence the youtube video.
And the best two will remain forever "Second Reality" for PC Demo and .theprodukkt from farbrausch, but only people who tried to code realtime graphical effects back inthe '90 and early 2000 will know why.
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Hahaha.
Remember when pirating games involved a Sanyo Twin Tape Deck Ghetto Blaster.
Back when software was available on vinyl (records) inside magazines?
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What would be the fraction: (Size of actual code like C++ or other language files)/(Size of resources like bitmaps, sound files, etc.)?
Less than 5%, I believe.
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okay fair
Real programmers use butterflies
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You can get 2tb drives for less than $60 - check NewEgg.
That should give you enough room for at least five more games. 
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
modified 18-May-20 13:45pm.
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2.5inch 2TB drives are a little pricier than that. I just ordered a 1TB for about $50
Real programmers use butterflies
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My first PC games were text based and loaded with a cassette! (ti-994a ca. 1983) 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Aaahh the 45min loading on my friend's good old Amstrad CPC464...
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Mmh, that's half the size of Acrobat Reader. Enough said.
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Are you just joking, or talking about something completely different?
In my installation, the entire Reader directory is 173 Mbytes.
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A bit of both actually : We have acrobat reader X at work, a full size 3,7Gb download.
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Giving that for instance this[^] is possible with 64k, I wonder what all these Gb are for.
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Those guys working with 64Ki (and even 4Ki) videos are completely crazy!
If you think you have been "optimizing", you haven't seen what is done in movies like this. To mention an example I heard of: The scene included a chair, standin at angle to the wall. That angle was selected not at random, but because its binary representation gave the highest degree of compression, had the least cost in number of bits, with the compression method used to represent the data. Another angle might have cost several bits more, in the amount of space required...
Of course I am impressed. Of course I think it is fun to see the results. But I am not one who will use digital tweezers to pick up bits one by one to compare their sizes and select the smaller one. By all means, I think they should go on. It just isn't for me - except as an audience.
This is not something new, though. I picked up the my first pile of 64Ki graphics "movies" in 2003, made by the "Farb-rausch" group in 2000 - you can download the actual 64Ki executable from e.g. fr-08: .the .product by Farbrausch :: pouët.net[^] to convince yourself that it is for real. Do note: These animation played flawlessly on standard PCs twenty years ago! I openly admit that first time I played it, I didn't believe it was real, so I pulled out the network cable and played it again...
If you are fascinated by this "Color rush": There is a list of their productions at Farbrausch - Wikipedia[^]. Another one that is certainly impressing (and most so for its age) is the 2001 production "fr-013: flybye" - well, the entire series is impressing.
You will find a lot of the movies at YouTube, but as complete movies, they definitely fill more than 64Ki - but sometimes, it is difficult to find the raw executables. This "pouet.net" site is probably one of the safest bets.
If you want to see a really impressing file: Pick up Skyline by LJ & Logicoma :: pouët.net[^] and try to pick the exe out of the zip file and play it before looking at the size of the excutable. You won't believe it!
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Member 7989122 wrote: Farbrausch
I was at demoparties back then, I know them, I talked several times with their members. They came up with the compression technology back then - 2002 was their first real elaborated 64k release at the Mekka&Symposium, and the least we can say was that their demo was better with 64k than the first of the no-size-limit category...
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Skyline by LJ & Logicoma
Nice one, BTW  !
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There is a wise old adage: "If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is".
A week or two ago, someone in the Lounge (sorry - I forget who) was commenting on getting cheap licenses for Office 2019, saying that many of them are legitimate. I've been on Office 2007 since it came out so I thought I'd explore the market. The cheapest I found was £22.06 for Office 2019 Professional. So, I took the plunge and bought 2 licenses and installed one (the other is for my wife's laptop). After finding the official download site, entering my MS account and the license key, the install just chugged away in the background. It inherited all of my email settings (multiple accounts, lots of rules), all of the contacts and all of my old messages with absolutely no input from me. It did re-download everything again from my provider's email service, but hey! that's life; getting things twice is better than losing everything, which is what I had feared would happen.
My real worry was all of the little apps I'd written in Access 97 (before I'd upgraded to Office 2007) which had needed tweaking to work in Access 2007. Don't judge me for my choice of tools back in the last millennium. They all worked straight out of the box and even reinstated a feature that O2K7 lost (showing custom icons in the task bar).
However, I now have discovered that it is running the 32-bit version of the product. I thought O2K19 Pro was only available in 64 bit. Despite, that it seems to be running OK. Watch out for a possible posting from me in a few days / weeks time bemoaning my folly, but it looks OK at the moment; worth risking 2 * £22.06.
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jsc42 wrote: However, I now have discovered that it is running the 32-bit version of the product.
I am so old that I once wrote an internal memo arguing that 16 bits is enough, if you learn how to structure your system into segments (similar to the DLLs of today). It was more or less true, too, in those days: The Pascal compiler compiled to 17Ki 16-bit instructions. (The machine adressed by words, with separate code and data spaces, so in fact 64Ki meant 128Kibyte code, 128Kibyte data.)
Applications have grown to completely crazy sizes nowadays, so 16 bits should not be enough for everybody. But with the exception of a very small subset of problems (which is likely to require a supercomputer anyway!), if you cannot fit the stuff you are doing into 32 bits, then you should go back to the drawing board and strongly reconsider your structure of modules, DLLs, processes and whathaveyou. I see no valid reason whatsoever that an office package should not have plenty of space in 32 bits (heck - we were running a rather fancy office suite on that 16-bit machine!).
The demand for 64 bits everywhere is like the demand for a new car to be able to go 240 km/h in a country with standard highway speed limit of 80 km/h and only a few top rate four lane motorways going up to 110 km/h. Noone really needs the ability to go twice as fast. And extremely few need 64 bits. It is like 4K video on your 5" phone screen being an essential marketing point. Or HiFi sound distributed in 24bit/96KHz format. It is a sales point, but really, it is a "mine is bigger than yours" thing.
The HiFi markets ended up essentially ignoring 24/96. I wouldn't be surpised if we five years from now have a wave of "lean" software design in 32 bit format. Because with proper system design, there is no reason why any process would need more - even in light of the classical 640K-argument.
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There's a significant part of me that wants to disagree with you on this score, but I really can't. The flat memory addressing scheme beyond 4GB and the extra kernel potential there (depending on how your OS is structured) is about the only major benefit of going beyond 32bit in practice, and honestly, how necessary is it?
I think it's fair to argue that it's nice to be able to address huge memory windows beyond 4GB for many reasons, even if it's not physically backed by RAM, but again at the end of the day, it's not necessary.
The only problem with ignoring that is that it increases the cost of such software by making it necessarily more complicated - now you have to use segmented addressing of some kind.
I guess at the end of the day the engineers and bean counters came together and felt it was a necessary advancement.
So while I agree with you, I can see the other end of this too. There's definitely room for 64 bit systems. Maybe they don't need to be as ubiquitous though.
If I had to bet, I'd say 32bit isn't going away for the forseeable future.
Real programmers use butterflies
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That may be true, but I'm not just talking about desktops and laptops - I'm talking about CPUs broadly, including embedded
Real programmers use butterflies
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