https://web.archive.org/web/20150112121832/https://www.pouet...
(for completeness, cdak pouet/download page: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=55758 - youtube capture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCh3Q08HMfs)
The Mars demo was written by Elixir's resident graphics guru and Head of R & D Tim Clarke in 1993, whilst he was still at school. Freely distributed on the Internet, the demo soon gained legendary status for its ability to generate fractal terrain and render it real time, all with a meagre 5K. As a result Tim was headhunted to work for space agency Lunacorp in Washington for several summers whilst studying at Cambridge University.
We recommend running this in DOS mode as it was designed to run on a 386 and may well crash Windows. Remember that this demo was designed for machines that were around in 1993! Use the mouse to move around and press any key to quit.
It's fascinating to see that 30 years later someone is still working around its source code.
I remember as a child, I had spent a lot of time on this, but perhaps the direction was wrong. (-:
[1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-3784-6
For comparison: In Windows 11, Notepad's size, referring to the disk space it occupies, is approximately 25.1 MB according to the Microsoft Store.
Anyways, none of these "mainsteam" apps hold a candle to sizecoding productions. Just look like what comes out of Lovebyte, a demoparty where no production is above 1 kB.
I do like that the rich text support allows converting to/from Markdown, but I still prefer plaintext mode.
As if they tried to avoid the sweet spot the best they could.
If we could train AI to do it, it might be a revolution in software performance.
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