This reminds me a bit of the science of nanoinformatics as described in one of the Expanse novellas (The Vital Abyss):<p>"<i>A thought experiment from my first course in the program: Take a bar of metal and put a single notch in it. The two lengths thus defined have a relationship that can be expressed as the ratio between them. In theory, therefore, any rational number can be expressed with a single mark on a bar of metal. Using a simple alphabetic code, a mark that calculated to a ratio of.12152205 could be read as 12-15-22-05, or “l-o-v-e.” The complete plays of Shakespeare could be written in a single mark, if it were possible to measure accurately enough. Or the machine language expression of the most advanced expert systems, though by then the notch might be small enough that Planck’s constant got in the way. How massive amounts of information could be expressed in and retrieved from infinitesimal objects was the driving concern of my college years."</i><p>Pure fiction at this point, but it would be an interesting experiment to encode data into objects that could be expressed using the mathematical ratio of their shapes or sizes.
I was confused as to how you could represent a bootable CD image in printable characters. It turns out that you can't. This is a tweet of a perl script which creates a cd.iso file that you can then boot from. The perl script significantly decompresses the data in the tweet.<p>That said, this is a playable game in around 60 bytes of actual data which is impressive.
If you want to see demos (as in demoscene) in a tweet of 140 characters - <a href="https://www.dwitter.net/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dwitter.net/</a>
Hats off for making use of the AAA instruction. That's a very clever sequence converting up/down/left/right to -320/+320/-1/+1.
As someone that develops almost exclusively in high-level languages on top of may levels of abstraction, it's nice to see what can be accomplished close to the metal.<p>This reminds me of Steve Gibson's SpinRite, which (from what I recall) is a fully functional disk recovery utility written entirely in assembly. <a href="https://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm</a>. Say what you want about the man, but this is something that's saved me on at least one occasion, and is smaller than things I produce that do a lot lot less.
Your snake game doesn't even have food for the snake to eat? The snake just grows without eating, until the head collides with the tail somewhere? Pssh, amateur hour...<p>/s (Just kidding this is actually super cool.)
This is great, and ironically it’s sitting next to another HN article where, in the comments, someone is actually defending a NYT news article that weighs in at 6MB.<p>In a time when most software is filled with superfluous waste and endless layers of abstraction and libraries, it’s nice to see that the art of writing minimal software is not completely lost.
The actual tweet: <a href="https://twitter.com/alokmenghrajani/status/1007514337592987648" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/alokmenghrajani/status/10075143375929876...</a>
Make sure you check out the floppy version from ~3 years ago. Fits in “old” tweets (ie 140 chars): <a href="https://www.quaxio.com/bootloader_retro_game_tweet/" rel="nofollow">https://www.quaxio.com/bootloader_retro_game_tweet/</a>
This is the second time this week I've seen someone note that ISO standards are expensive - are they copyrighted or something? Why doesn't someone just publish them online for free?
Man I love these things. Back before Twitter upped their character limits, I remember a trick to cram more data in a tweet was to abuse how Twitter counts characters (it attempts to count visually rather than by byte), so by using a ton of multipart emojis or larger Unicode characters to over double the information that could fit in a tweet.
i love love love this.<p>This is a fantastic way to get into low level programming with a fun,tangible and approachable result.<p>back in "the day (TM)", we used to do this with ..achem ..viruses on floppies :) Putting it in a tweet is just brilliant.<p>anyone remember the one where it would say "smoke more weed dude"? (or something of the sort) :)
Not as cool as this, but here are some PHP "frameworks" in a tweet (140 characters):<p><a href="http://www.twitto.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.twitto.org/</a><p><a href="https://gist.github.com/mathiasverraes/9046427" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/mathiasverraes/9046427</a><p><a href="https://philsturgeon.uk/php/2009/12/15/Twiny-Framework-the-framework-small-enough-to-tweet/" rel="nofollow">https://philsturgeon.uk/php/2009/12/15/Twiny-Framework-the-f...</a><p><a href="https://gist.github.com/jeremeamia/2720020" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/jeremeamia/2720020</a>
The explanation is quite good but is there even more detail on what the assembly instructions are doing on a line by line basis? I’ve only written MIPS assembly and that was a long time ago.
Looks like the turbo button needs to be in the on position for this one: 0.05 FPS in a qemu KVM on my old P8600... I presume the game loop uses the hardware clock :P<p>btw my base64 util needed lower case -d