Slashdot Mirror
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!"
The skill of writing small games is highly relevent again as new mobile phones with the ability to run custom software is starting to appear.
Also, it would be nice if some game programmers ever asked them selves 'can I do this with less code and memory consumption?'. The answer would most probably be yes in many cases.
An example of this is the use of large look-up tables instead of doing a medium-sized calculation. As the caches can't hold an entire game today, the penalty for using a large look-up table is probably pretty big, since it is spread over a larger section of the memory than a medium (properly aligned) calculation routine.
When discussing code size, I must say that the best (in the amusing, fun, addictive way) I've had was Super Cars II on the Amiga. Great game, only one (or two) 720kB floppys. It had what many of today's games lack of: gameplay.
They are only 1K games if you don't count calls to the OS or ROM BIOS. Back in the old Atari 2600 days 1K really was 1K since there was no code anywhere but in the game cartridge.
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.