Hey PC Techies, how in a flying newts bridal bath is this possible?!! - Page 2

Mr. Harley · December 12, 2003, 06:09

Unless you are a 40-60 hour a week temp employee, who MS has screwed out of any benefits, attempting to ignore three sets of court orders, and being held in contempt of court for ignoring them. I haven't checked on what happened since the last contempt citation. When discussing the business ethics of large corporations, is that akin to jumbo shrimp?

Urban Ranger · December 12, 2003, 06:27

I reckon some are better than others, though

aneeshm · December 12, 2003, 08:11

Amazing . I don't care what technology they used , if this can be standardised for video , the days of having only oen movie or game on a CD are over . Imagine your entire movie and music library on one CD .

Thorn · December 12, 2003, 08:26

Quote:

Originally posted by aneeshm
Amazing . I don't care what technology they used , if this can be standardised for video , the days of having only oen movie or game on a CD are over . Imagine your entire movie and music library on one CD .

$hit with that theoretical compression imagine having every movie and film ever created from the 1800s onward fitting on one CD. You could put everything ever aired on TV cable and Satellite with reruns included on one DVD. The limits are almost boundless... but it would really finish the entertainment industry... there would be no way in hell to regulate the free trade and copyright infringments of such discs...

Mercator · December 12, 2003, 12:21

But as has already been said, it's not about compression.

The sound is just MIDI, the graphics are vector-based with textures. Moreover, the vector graphics are based on distorted geometric shapes rather than polygons, like 3D games are.

Sure, it looks good, even more so for its small size, but it has absolutely no implications whatsoever for audio or video, and it's even long away from having any implications for games.

Saying this revolutionises anything is like saying MIDI revolutionised music storage. MIDI allows you to put hundreds of hours of music on one CD, but that's because it uses your computer as a synthesizer.

Thorn · December 12, 2003, 13:42

Jesus Mercator, I had no idea you are still around... I used to be Evan von Christoph before Ming permbanned that login....probably don't remember me (maybe a good thing)...

Still I don't care whether it is a generator, luminator or modulator-- I just don't get how it can be done in 64kb....

Mercator · December 12, 2003, 14:12

Quote:

Originally posted by Thorn
Jesus Mercator, I had no idea you are still around...

AFAIK, the last time you saw me, you said the same thing (and I'm pretty sure that was this year).

And I do remember you.

Quote:

I just don't get how it can be done in 64kb....

Haven't you ever played any computer games before the advent of CD-ROMs?

I think it's more of a mystery why modern games need as much space as they do.

Az · December 12, 2003, 14:36

It's quite obvious it's generated, and isn't video. I don't know about you, but I get this small short bunches of letters around the graphics. I don't think they're supposed to be there.

Anyway, I still fail to see how all of this was crunched into 64k. I played a mario game for the computer, that WAS amazing for 50k. That is, I thought it was amazing, until I saw this.

Dis · December 13, 2003, 03:31

so can I run this on my commodore 64?

Urban Ranger · December 13, 2003, 04:04

Quote:

Originally posted by Azazel
Anyway, I still fail to see how all of this was crunched into 64k. I played a mario game for the computer, that WAS amazing for 50k. That is, I thought it was amazing, until I saw this.

That's not that hard. A game is a complicated piece of software with lots of options and bits of data floating around. If you have ever played around with 3D packages some save very small data files, because everything else is generated by the program on the fly.

Those demos are interesting, but making a bunch of distorted geometric shapes to make a few figures and run them in a tight loop doesn't say anything significant. Esp. when they can throw stuff out to DirectX.

cia · December 13, 2003, 04:08

Look up Mandelbrot equations and let me know how small they are. Takes nothing to build varying geometric shapes with different seed values and let them go from there. From what little I know of video game manufacture the bump maps cause much of the size bloat along with the code loosely termed AI.

Az · December 13, 2003, 06:54

cia: these aren't fractal images.

UR:

Quote:

That's not that hard. A game is a complicated piece of software with lots of options and bits of data floating around. If you have ever played around with 3D packages some save very small data files, because everything else is generated by the program on the fly.

obviously, I haven't.

But I wouldn't say that this

Quote:

a bunch of distorted geometric shapes to make a few figures and run them in a tight loop .

is a correct description of those programs.

Wraith · December 13, 2003, 11:39

Hah. Think I found what they did this for.

Check out http://www.0a000h.de/compos.php
There's an assembly langauge contest coming up, and one of the entry classes is 64KB. Trying to pass this off as compression is rather sleazy, though.

There's been a couple links posted to entries from past events.

--"As for generating the graphics on the fly, it would take an excess of processing power to do this"

It doesn't really take much. The basics are, well, basic. It's not like computers these days don't have tons of extra horsepower to spare anyway.

The first demos like this that I saw ran fine on P-100s.

--"Anyway, I still fail to see how all of this was crunched into 64k."

Vector graphics and hand-coded assembly. You can do a lot in a little space.

Wraith
"Remember, if you smoke after sex you're doing it too fast."
-- Woody Allen

Az · December 13, 2003, 12:40

why isn't it done a lot more, then?

Kaak · December 13, 2003, 12:49

you guys are going overboard on your calculations... with this compression ratio, and the assumption that most movies are 4.7 GB, you could only fit 4468.085 movies on a 700MB cd

Urban Ranger · December 13, 2003, 13:26

Quote:

Originally posted by Azazel
why isn't it done a lot more, then?

Time and expertise.

Good assembly programmers are rare, and it takes a lot longer to write assmbler programs. You use assembly when space and speed overrides every other factor, say, embedded controllers. Otherwise, modern optimising compilers produce good enough code for genera use.

And what do you say is a good description for those programs?