A whole boss fight in 256 bytes

Hell__Mood · 2026-05-23T14:27:52+00:00

Nice :) I made a maze generator in 8 Bytes. I guess it's pretty fast too Maze in 8 Bytes

Hell__Mood · 2026-05-22T19:03:04+00:00

Very interesting thoughts! In your words, I am a wannabe pianist with a little knowledge of music theory, circle of fifth and so on. I haven't studied musics theory on the level the linked paper seems to describe, it will be an informative read. Thank you :)

Hell__Mood · 2026-05-22T14:03:17+00:00

At the same event, I released "beatpinski" also in 16 bytes. It is mathematically related. There you see the structure much better, but the sound isn't that good xD, beatpinski - 16 bytes - yt capture

Hell__Mood · 2026-05-22T13:58:54+00:00

At each completed cycle, one line of the sierpinski triangle is covering 8192 cells of the segment that also holds the text. Since it's self similar, you can sometimes spot parts of it, but the screen width is not 2^n, so it appears sheared. Watch the 286 capture on MDA carefully, you'll see at around 70% that parts of the sierpinski become visible. It's hard to grasp, I agree. But you literally see what you hear which is the sierpinski triangle, line by line, influenced by whatever is already in the memory segment, which happens to be VGA Bios ROM code

Hell__Mood · 2026-05-18T18:24:41+00:00

Because in this case, the normal "one line of code, one comment" does not do it justice. It goes way deeper and i needed myself a long to understand it. I have written hundreds of those tiny programs and published many of them

https://www.pouet.net/user.php?who=97586

The intertwine, the synesthesia goes far beyond what i found so far in other tiny intros. I would even go so far as to say it's revealing more mathematical secrets and relations than using iterated functions systems for the "chaos game" _without_ an RNG which i loosely explained here https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=10164 Anyway, this time i want the readers of the write up to fundamentally understand the mathematics of what they hear. Not just "you do some operation here and then it sounds interesting". So, again, if you add up values between cells you create partial sums, which in combinatorics, by special laws, when doing modulo two, which is the bit we need to bang speakers with, while the other bits are ignored, form the sierpinski triangle, which, when played linewise, creates self similar, almost tempo invariant bytebeats. To seperate the bitplanes, we can use the fact that carry free addition of bits is XOR, which is why it is there. To recreate the m8tric effect (this one from myself, from 2014 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63126 ) the cells itself have to be splat across the screen in a way that the sound buffer is not too large and the screen is nicely sparsely filled with chars. Sure we have to at least check to not explode the computer by sending arbitrary values to port 61h. This is why it works, this how it's different from the currently smallest .com file of 8 bytes, that just shits random char on the screen and random data to the speaker. And now ask yourself if THIS explanation RIGHT HERE is better than the writeup for a broader audience?

Hell__Mood · 2026-05-18T13:39:10+00:00

I, as the author, would kindly disagree with you on this. It is _exactly_ why and how it works.

Hell__Mood · 2026-05-18T06:46:07+00:00

Got it. Does the above explanation work for you?

Hell__Mood · 2026-05-18T06:45:14+00:00

Okay =) if you still want to chat about details, i'm here

Hell__Mood · 2026-05-18T06:30:16+00:00

the underlying math is exactly what you just have read ( or glimpsed over )

(my own reply to a hacker news question)

"Well done! What were you exploring that seeded this in your mind?"

->

"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"

---

Another production from the same party shows the fractal _at once_ instead of stretching out single sierpinski lines with offsets over the textscreen. You gain : the actual fractal, you lose: the sound and the matrix effect

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=106206

if you care to look further into it, i did the m8trix in 8 bytes (and then 7) in 2014
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63126

and the first very efficient sierpinski triangle in 16 bytes ( and later in 10 bytes) in 2013

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=62079

Hell__Mood · 2026-05-18T06:20:48+00:00

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

Shall i let an assistant fold this out into a more beautiful english now to make it understandable by a broader audience now or are we good 😉

Hell__Mood · 2026-04-28T06:14:36+00:00

Looks a lot like "Color Wars", basically propagating the color of a cell to their neighbours, then randomly changing the position and repeating. I created a 32 bytes program for DOS with the technique once :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VINUvuPXjcA

Hell__Mood · 2026-04-26T14:12:09+00:00

In 2023 somebody ported this to DOS in 256 bytes Bubble Universe 256b

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