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.
August 4th, 2011 - 23:26
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.
August 26th, 2011 - 12:15
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…
July 12th, 2012 - 16:14
That was sweet . I must try that :D.
November 29th, 2012 - 23:54
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?
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November 29th, 2012 - 23:56
yes, it won’t work on 64 bit machines since it uses specific asm instructions. i managed to run it using DosBox.
December 19th, 2012 - 14:58
I have to heared about that type of programming.Its very nice concept.Glad toknow about that type of technology.
October 6th, 2014 - 09:16
I keep on coming back to this post and every time I’m amazed.