Rrola – Ameisen (32 bytes, MS DOS, 2007)

Well, Goto80 curated some sort of demo-showcase, dedicated to visuals with less than 256 bytes of space (less than a SMS-message). He says about it:

HELLO DID YOU KNOW? People make visuals that are smaller than an SMS (256 bytes). Since they are not recorded video, they can be changed any way you wish. It is maybe the opposite to all the things that everybody loves to hate: software updates, über-consumption, compatibility, inefficiency, recording, the illusion of the universal computer, and so on. (…) To me these are ideal examples of wo-man-machine interaction, where media materialism meets software magic. Stop recording!

Totally agreed. Read more at Chipflip.

Social Demo’ing on Twitter?

Oh, if we are already on this topic. Did you know, that Twitter features less than 140 characters? It – at least in theory – should be possible without a problem, to use this fancy web-thingy in order to exchange full demos and have this fast updates and community thing also going on. If found some mysterious first approach like this, at the twitter-account of emoc.

Update: Found an interesting article on the birth of the 160 character limit at SMS-text messages.

Blog, Research and Theory - Date published: May 5, 2009 | 7 Comments

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  1. djmike said:

    heya,

    Grant Skinner organized a contest called #tweetcoding for which the entries were a program written in Actionscript 3 that fit into a “tweet” (<= 140 chars). A few links for more info:

    http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2009/03/tweetcoding_sim.html
    http://machine501.com/tweetcoding/

    some decent visuals were created.

    cheers.

  2. 020200 said:

    Cool, many thanks. Do anyone know more tweetcoding-stuff?

  3. […] would be the web, if an fresh idea you had would not been already realised by someone else? Welcome Tweetcoding! This is a little […]

  4. joem said:

    This tweetcoding is very very different than things like the 32 byte DOS demo you posted a video of. Were you to compile any of the tweetcoding scripts, it would be at the very least a few hundred kilobytes big, if even that small. Most likely they’d be several megabytes in size. In other words, a few hundred thousand times larger up to a few million times larger.

    Small source code and small executable are two very different things. For instance, check out my source code (written in joem-script) for the entire game of Doom 3: “begin; run doom3; end;” — It’s only 22 bytes! And it’s the entire game of Doom 3!

    And yes, I know you weren’t claiming they’re the same thing. I merely wanted to point out just how different they are.

  5. 020200 said:

    Hi Joem,

    I thought of exactly the same issue, just after posting.

    Nevertheless, I think that 140 charaters in *sourcecode* can be an interesting demo-platform for today, since small filesizes in general seems to get more interest right at the moment. Ahm, sry for mixing two things together again. ;)

  6. Optimus said:

    Just a little mistake on the article, not very important but in the first line you say 256k while it should be 256b.

  7. 020200 said:

    Indeed, thanks for correting me, Optimus!