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ADM Blog
22Jul/110

Pixel Programming

If you're old enough you may have seen the times when programmers wrote code as optimal as possible given the computers available back then. I remember 3D shooter games that would average 300 - 400 KB in size and you would play countless levels for days. Here's for example a 96 KB 3D shooter game called .kkriger that will leave you breathless.

If you try now to explain people these days that it takes less space to write a 3 minutes HD animated video and music clip than than it takes to store a 32×32 pixel icon they won't believe you. Not now when a plain jpeg image used on some website is > 50KB. So here's a guy called Iñigo Quílez who demonstrates just that using the image analogy. He writes a x86 real mode demo using Photoshop. The entire program is done by creating a 9x9 pixels image, filling each pixels with carefully chosen colors to represent the correct opcodes (who needs compilers, right ?) The image is then saved in a .raw format (no headers) then renames it to a .com file so that Windows recognize it as a executable. The animation is a infinite moving tunnel with a gray colored texture created with an XOR pattern, blurred, and deformed using a plane deformation technique to produce the animation.

This is the "source code" resized 10 times in a png extension

And here's the guy in action proving his mad skills.

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  1. One of the coolest things i’ve seen! This will no doubt reinvent the way people see videogames. Not only games, the possibilities are endless.

  2. gaming has become quite the sophisticated hobby these days with a lot of effort going into developing games that could rival any real life experience…

  3. That was sweet . I must try that :D.

  4. Hi
    Interesting post-thanks.
    I tried this on my Win7 desktop PC but only got an incompatability error…pity!
    eg:
    “is not compatible with the version of Windows you’re running. Check your computer’s system information to see whether you need a x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) version of the program, and then contact the software publisher”
    It would be cool to fix this so it works-any ideas how?
    Richard recently posted..Web Video Mastery (makeyourownwebvideos.com)My Profile

  5. I have to heared about that type of programming.Its very nice concept.Glad toknow about that type of technology.

  6. I keep on coming back to this post and every time I’m amazed.


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