Call it the 0.5k.

October 18, 2001 8:15 PM

Call it the 0.5k. Like a certain widely-heralded Web design contest, the Minigame competition pits clever programmers against each other to see who can do the most with the least. But instead of Web pages, these competitors create games for obsolete 8-bit computers (Atari, Commodore, etc.) in two weight classes: 2K and 512 bytes (!).
posted by jjg (5 comments total)

I fully understand the urge to have these contests. My roommate once brought home a VIC-20 and I found it very hard to resist writing a game on that primitive hardware. Low-level programming can be intimidating on today's architectures, but it's not so daunting when you've only got 4K of memory. Old-school gaming is where the real creativity shines.
posted by Succa at 8:29 PM on October 18, 2001

Almost forgot: via ntk. They do good work over there, in my opinion.
posted by jjg at 9:05 PM on October 18, 2001

hrm. Actualy for those systems, thats not that much of a strech, you really only had a few k of ROM to use for those games.

If you want to see something really amazing, check out some of the 64k intros put out by the demo scene these days.
posted by delmoi at 9:21 PM on October 18, 2001

This takes me back to the days of Sinclair Programs magazine, where you would spend all afternoon typing in a program only to realise when you were finished, that it was rubbish.

Ah, the nostalgia...
posted by salmacis at 1:06 AM on October 19, 2001

I love demos, although I prefer the "true" 64k demos of yesterday over the "64k plus 2 megs worth of DirectX code", made easy by linking in a .dll or two. Although even those are still cool.

I'm always fascinated by the idea of trying to cram as much "stuff" into as small of a memory footprint or executable as possible. Lots of folks probably share that enthusiasm. Hence these contests. That's also the reason why I love Steve Gibson's stuff.
posted by Succa at 7:43 AM on October 19, 2001