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How much Game Do You Get For 1k?
nafmo writes "In this day and age of quadruple-dvd games with amazingly big 3D worlds, one might think that the science of compact coding has been lost forever. Well, not so, ast the 2002 MiniGame competition proves. There are 62 games for 14 different vintage computer platforms, of which none take up more than 1024 bytes. The vote for this year's best minigame ends on 7th of October, so you'd better grab the votepack and start playing!"
I am too young to really know what Commodore 64 games looked like
Then head on over to an Abandonware site like The Under Dogs and try a few for your self.
On the otherhand, old games are not really about what they look like, cos they pretty much all look dreadful by todays standards, rather, its about what the games PLAY like. And thats why people still enjoy them today.
I saw the light at the end of the tunnel... But it was just someone with a flashlight bringing more work.
As one of the authors, I can tell you that at least my entries use very few ROM calls. I believe I could effectively replicate the code used in no more than 200 bytes or so - and in the case of `dotathon', I could very easily have made it run ROM-call-free in 1k if I hadn't added sound.
And FWIW, the smallest Atari 2600 cartridge size was 2k, not 1k.
It's not really that amazing. The executable might be 64k, but it needs DirectX to run. So basically the executable contains 64k of instructions that tell DirectX what to draw. It's not as if they wrote a 3D engine demo in 64k. More like a 64k DirectX script.
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Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
The rules for this particular compo stated you were allowed to use any ROMs and hardware features of the platform you chose. Maybe that's the reason we had a low number of console entries (2 NES, 3 GBC, 2 Lynx), as programmers of those felt they had a disadvantage. For you information, we had a similar programming event the other year which did NOT allow use of ROM routines or extra RAM for calculating tables.
But even if you're using all features of a stock vintage machine, you still can't use visual and audial appearance to judge between a ZX81 and a Commodore 64 game. I see this more as a battle for best idea and gameplay on limited space.