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Pretty much off topic, but Řrřola, the author of this blog post, also makes mind blowing 256 byte demos.

E.g. Puls from 2009: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53816 (check the youtube link if you don't have an MS-DOS ready)

I understand little about extreme sizecoding, but I suspect it's a similarly obsessed mathy story as this blog post, to double use the same bytes as code and content in a way that things actually work and look great.




From the author:

What is it: implicit surfaces raymarching using binary search. The shapes get "blown up" according to step size, which fakes the ambient occlusion feel (also necessary for the bisection to work). Color is the number of missed probes minus log(last step size), which had the most bearable artifacts.

- implicit surfaces are surfaces defined as the solution of an equation f(x,y,z)=0

- raymarching is a raytracing technique where you advance step by step along the ray, it is a very common technique for sizecoding. The rest of the description detail the rendering tricks used for shading and coloring.

The "content" does not "use the same byte as code", it is code, in the form of the implicit surface equation.


I heard some Nintendo games does that with sprites or sounds that can take on a random-ish look. Very very cool.


Yars' Revenge on the Atari 2600 used the game code as random input to generate the graphics for the 'safe zone'




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