HellMood

Youtube Capture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A-XJjnU5Oo

    X: lds si,[bx+si]
    add al,0xad
    out 61h,al
    jmp short X+1

For 486, no FPU, for MsDos FreeDos, WinXP Dos, DosBox-X ... i made that rather in a hurry, so right now i have a version without background but wall bouncing like the original. But since the competition is already over, i will tinker a bit to make it perfect :)

the blank code for everbody who can read it ^^ you can paste it to http://twt86.co/ to run in a browser

  org 100h
  mov al,0x13
  les bp,[bx]
  int 0x10
  X: sub dh,95
  mov al,[bp+si]
  add dl,al
  imul al
  sub dh,ah
  mov bx,dx      
  mov al,bh      
  imul al        
  xchg ax,dx    
  imul al       
  add dx,ax   
  mov ch,7
  imul ax,di,byte 102
  sub ch,dh
  jle F        
  mov al,bl    
  cbw           
  idiv ch        
  add al,[bp+si] 
  xor al,bh      
  and al,16    
  mov al,31      
  jnz F           
  add al,9     
  F: stosb
  mov ax,0xCCCC
  mul di 
  adc byte [bp+si],cl 
  jmp short X

Those people should also definitely check out "Mariana" (2024), a 256 byte demo from the same author, using the same techniques, which was even nominated for the Meteoriks Award for that year.

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=96105

https://2025.meteoriks.org/laureates/#nominees-ota

  Features:
  - Multithreading (using all CPU cores & hyper-threads)
  - Full HD / HiColor (1920x1080 / 16 bpp)
  - 128-iterative fractal on FPU
  - Pure DOS (no drivers, no DPMI)

Howdy =) I didn't spot your analysis back then, but it's (still) spot on. A tiny addition, 0xA0000 to 0xB0000 is VGA memory when using graphics modes, so it's quite safe to write there until it flows into the visual text mode memory.

It requires specific graphics card setup ( it simulates an old system) Use the provided config from here https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=106210 Edit: for Dosbox X

At the same event I released "Broccolori", a 32 Byte fractal for old-school PCs.

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=106205

Related to the Dragon Fractal, with a twist:)

Author of "wake up" here. Yes, that one reactivated me again. We thought (as size coding community) that we found every cellular automaton trick years ago, but then Plex came around and showed us otherwise ♥

Author of "wakeup" here. You would would need between 32 and 64 bytes. I have something that almost looks like one in 32 but it's not published yet ;)

"Spongy" was one of my inspirations to try something similar in 64 bytes.

Of course it's not the same, but "flying through a 3D grayscale orthogonal structure" is actually possible in 64

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=78044

I tested this on a real FreeDos based notebook and it survived ;) But seriously, on more modern systems it doesnt do anything harmful anymore, while i have read that on older systems, you could provoke a system crash this way. Which then would create the interesting task of designing the CA in a way that it "avoids" the hazardous values. For now it seems that "anything goes", at least on all my semi-old and newer systems. DosBox Emulators literally dont care ;)

"Rainy" was a 32 bytes production in a (strong!) 256byte competition "Wakeup" was a 16 bytes production in a (strong ^^) 128byte competition

Sometimes, content to size ratio wins. Other times, not so much ;)

In that way the title is misleading. My original "m8trix" from 2014 already did smear pseudorandom letters across the screen ( in 8 bytes, then in 7 ) https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63126 and i always wondered how i could make it "sound good". But chronologically in the development of "wakeup" the sound was first. Since you "see what you hear" it doesnt really matter, but "16 bytes that turn sierpinski sound into matrix rain" would be true too =)

Hey, glad you like this as well. Fun fact, i had a COVOX version which even sounded better, but didnt work sometimes ... so i handed in the "slightly worse" version xD

Oh yes, that was one of my first demoscene productions :)

Actually, just a few days ago, i had the chance to run a modified CGA 8086 version of this on a real old piece of hardware https://youtu.be/XLrjChvJf0k

Hey, Blackle! Yeah, i agree :/ In short, for now: Manually, dozens or hundreds of them. The process was just tinkering around with CAs and sound. "What's left" is how it still sounds remarkably different than it should on a clinically clean memory segment, but in a way that i like much much better xD So the unfolding would be, why does it sound like this, and how can i steer it, and then, how can i minify it. Maybe it can be folded into the original 16 bytes as well =)

It was and is still super unepxected! i created a lot of "noise" or "CA" sound intros but this one stands out. The specific spice here is how memory is initialized on "clear screen" and whats "before" and "after" the actual visible memory. The "pure" sound is also lovely (i can carefully set everything with a few more bytes to make it sound the same on all systems) but this spicy difference i still to have fully understand makes it sound even better imho =)

It kind of still is! The pure sound shouldnt even sound like that, so i have to still dig around memory configurations and initalizations (graphics card wise) to 100% explain why it sounds a tad different than it should.

Actually a) polymorphic asm instructions, like "add [bx+si],al" which is 0x0000 b) jumping into middle of instructions to save bytes and reuse opcodes

In hundreds of tiny experiments, this one stuck out, just by the sound of it. When i unfolded what's left and removed "the rest" i had a hard time to grasp what's really going on. i myself didnt expect that the explanation would go this deep for just these few bytes xD

TLDR: Each time step, another sierpinski triangle line is a) played on the speaker b) drawn to the screen with stepsize of 56. You can sense the motion, but not really see it, since it's 8192 "pixels wide" but one line of chars is just 80 bytes. One a much much much bigger screen, you could see the triangle. Or, if you dont "skip pixels" and draw it all at once, you would see it as well. In fact, i did a version at the very the same party that does that, but the specific sound gets lost on that one

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=106206 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVk-iP93ZEs

Well, it would be 2^(7*8) = 72057594037927936 possible intros. Someone/something has to generate, run and evaluate them all. Theoretically it's the "halting problem" all over, to wait for the "final output" of each intro. The 16 byte effect for example takes a while to achieve its final form. So even if it is somehow managed to evaluate 1000 intros per second, we are looking at about 2 million years of time to really test ALL possible 7 byte intros.

Thanks :)

and yes, your observations are spot on.

I ran a patched version of it on WinXP (DOS NTVDM), the sound works there! But it requires a few extra bytes to enable MIDI UART Mode first. On DosBox-X, this can simply be set in the config ;)

i second that. "Second Nature" is also my party favorite! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFVxntafsXM&t=1764s

it's fine, you're right ;)

i'm thinking of making that interactive, remove (a bit of) sound and plot timing (which takes surprisingly many bytes!)

but i won't spoil anything until it's ready ;)

I mean, give it a try?

the source is right there ;)

You can (on real MSDOS!) go as low as 6 bytes

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63538

But most people wouldn't find that visually satisfying

The technical details why this works are very interesting though :)

I mean now that the (human written) source for this is out in the wild, of course it can ;)