My entry 'Zero Gravitas' from Assembly Summer '24 4-kilobyte intro competition.

Placed 5th.

Runs on Windows, 32bit intel/amd, needs a bit of a GPU to run smooth.

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=97446

Source code available from
https://github.com/gimulnautti/asm24-4k/

Youtube video for watching without .exe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVZ2hXDo_z8

#demoscene #4kintro

@gimulnautti big ups for releasing source code!

@krl No problem! The demoscene these days is much more friendly and supportive, and I must say I like it more this way!

Not yearning back the days of 1990’s ”punching down” on ”lamers” by the ”elites”. It was just a bunch of teenagers high on testosterone. And all that attracted criminals more than builders, frankly. There can be only so few people on top of a pyramid.

Enjoy the tips & tricks, build cool visuals!

@gimulnautti nice work!

I looked over my holidays how people target retro / old-school stuff, or at least majority of people, to MS-DOS. It was across the board OpenWatcom or even Turbo-C.

So I quickly put together a build pipeline, with custom linker scripts defining binary layout and no crt0 linked to the final binary. So now I can build .COM files with the code written in latest GCC or clang (LLVM) :-)

I've written the currently used arch x86 code in Linux that trampolines to real-mode and back when going into and away of suspend in 2012, so with those learnings of doing this type of custom binaries I also wrote shenanigans to access full 4 gigabytes of flat address space.

And just to refresh a bit I wrote a bit code that initializes so called "Mode-X" i.e. 320x240 planar squarepixel mode. I was able to run my stuff in 86box, which felt good ;-) I loose the C standard libraries as payback I have like the 2024 level development environment.

Might put it fully protected mode later on but BIOS access is nice for now. Protected mode is better than real-mode for performance, especially for data heavy real-time stuff like DSP and texture mapping because 32-bit memory accesses in tweaked unreal mode add a prefix to the opcode, which consumes icache ;-)

Not sure what I'm doing with this yet, probably just add random stuff to it without a plan. Also, MZ EXE bin generation is a target that I pursue.

@gimulnautti I have this big idea that would like to see how much you can pull juices out of P-166 Mhz MMX version of Pentium, which is sort of nice architecture, two ALU pipeline and concurrent MMX/FPU pipeline. With modern dev tools doing heavy recalculation there is a lot of resources in that type of machine.

@jarkko Wow! Yeah that sounds like a compo platform itself!

You could perhaps talk to the people at lovebyte or sizecoding.org, if they get some ideas out of that.

And you are exactly correct, with the new dev tools a completely new side becomes available from the old platforms. Like Amiga OCS (500) is definitely back, with the knowledge of techniques we have now being applied to take the old hardware into new heights.

"Make the machine more than it is", said Gray Marchers this year. I concur