Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38707095
The ZMachine games, ditto. A few kb's and an impressive simulated environment will run even under 8bit machines running a virtual machine. Of course z3 machine games will have less features for parsing/obj interaction than z8 machine games, but from a 16 bit machine and up (nothing today, a DOS PC would count) will run z8 games and get pretty complex text adventures. Compare Tristam Island or the first Zork I-III to Spiritwrak, where a subway it's simulated, or Anchorhead.
And you can code the games with Inform6 and Inform6lib with maybe a 286 with DOS or 386 and any text editor. Check Inform Beginner's Guide and DM4.pdf
Nethack/lashem weights MB's and has tons of replayability. Written in C. It will even run under a 68020 System 7 based Mac... emulated under 9front with an 720 CPU as the host. It will fly from a 486 CPU and up.
Meanwhile, Cataclysm DDA uses C++ and it needs a huge chuck of RAM and a fastly CPU to compile it today. Some high end Pentium4 with 512MB of RAM will run it well, but you need to cross compile it.
If I had the skills I would rewrite (no AI/LLM's please) CDDA:BN into Golang. The compiling times would plummet down and the CPU usage would be nearly the same. OFC the GC would shine here prunning tons of unused code and data from generated worlds.
Back in the day getting the 16KB expansion pack for my 1KB RAM ZX81 was a big deal. And I also wrote code for PIC microcontrollers that have 768 bytes of program memory [and 25 bytes of RAM]. It's just so easy to not think about efficiency today, you write one line of code in a high level language and you blow away more bytes than these platforms had without doing anything useful.
Instead - here's [0] Ben Daglish (on flute) performing "Wastelands" together with the Norwegian C64/Amiga tribute band FastLoaders. He unfortunately passed away in 2018, just 52 years old.
If that tickled your fancy, here's [1] a full concert with them where they perform all songs from The Last Ninja.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovFgdcapUYI [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTZ1O1LJg-k
Honestly though, I don't read much into the sizes. Sure they were small games and had lots of game play for some defintion of game play. I enjoyed them immensely. But it's hard to go back to just a few colors, low-res graphics, often no way to save, etc... for me at least, the modern affordances mean something. Of course I don't need every game to look like Horizon Zero Dawn. A Short Hike was great. It's also 400meg (according to steam)
Feels like they were closer to programs, while modern games are closer to datasets.
By comparison, COD Modern Warfare 3 is 6,000,000 times larger at 240GB. Imagine telling that to someone in 1987.
Here is a little clip of him from Bedroom to Billions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRsLOUYL3mk
All those old games have a way to save now, if you run them in an emulator as is commonly done these days. That's how I played through Metroid and finally beat the mother brain in just a day or two during the pandemic.
The quest for photorealistic "movie-like" rendering which requires colossal amounts of RAM and compute feels like a dead end to me. I much appreciate the expressly unrealistic graphics of titles like Monument Valley.
I still occasionally listen to it.
This mechanic is augmented by not even always knowing which graphics in the environment can be picked up, or by invisible items that are inside boxes or otherwise out of sight (I think LN2 had something in a bathroom? You have to position yourself in the doorway and do a squat of faith).
The other core memory is the spots that require a similarly awkward precision while jumping. These are worse, because each failure loses you one of your limited lives. The combat is also finicky. I remember if you come into a fight misaligned, your opponent might quickly drain your energy while you fail to get a hit in.
At the time, it seemed appropriate to me that it required such a difficult precision to be a ninja. I was also a kid, who approached every game non-critically, assuming each game was exactly as it was meant to be. Thus I absolutely loved it, lol.
I do completely agree that there is a lot of waste in modern software. But equally there is also a lot more that has to be included in modern software that wasn’t ever a concern in the 80s.
Networking stacks, safety checks, encryption stacks, etc all contribute massively to software “bloat”.
You can see how this quickly adds up if you write a “hello world” CLI in assembly and compare that to the equivalent in any modern language that imports all these features into its runtime.
And this is all before you take into account that modern graphics and audio is bitmap / PCM and running at resolutions literally orders of magnitude greater than anything supported by 80s micro computers.
Could you point to an example where those gigs were really "massively" due crash handling and bounds checks etc?
Or, if I write a short description "A couple walks hand-in-hand through a park at sunset. The wind rustles the orange leaves.", I don't think it would be surprising to anyone that an image or video of this would be relatively huge.
Sounds like every time I go to the bathroom ... :D
Go's "GC disadvantage" is turned on its head by developing "Zero Allocation" libraries which run blazingly fast with fixed memory footprints. Similarly, rolling your own high performance/efficient code where it matters can save tremendous amounts of memory where it matters.
Of course more features and safety nets will consume memory, but we don't have to waste it like there are no other things running on the system, no?
> And this is all before you take into account that modern graphics and audio is bitmap / PCM and running at resolutions literally orders of magnitude greater than anything supported by 80s micro computers.
This demo [0] is a 4kB executable. 4096 bytes. A single file. All assets, graphics, music and whatnot, and can run at high resolutions with real time rendering.
This is [1] 64kB and this [2] is 177kB. This game from the same group is 96kB with full 3D graphics [3].
[0]: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938
[1]: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1221
Much respect to people who've manage to retrofit it: there are guerilla translated versions of some Japanese-only games.
> this is all before you take into account that modern graphics and audio is bitmap / PCM and running at resolutions literally orders of magnitude greater
Yes, people underestimate how much this contributes, especially to runtime memory usage.
Bad code is bad code, poor choices are poor choices — but I think it’s often times pretty fair to judge things harshly on resource usage sometimes.
>Networking stacks, safety checks, encryption stacks, etc all contribute massively to software “bloat”.
They had most of this stuff in the 1980s, and even earlier really. Not on your little 8-bit microcomputer that cost $299 that might have had as a kid, but they certainly did exist on large time-sharing systems used in universities and industry and government. And those systems had only a tiny fraction of the memory that a typical x86-64 laptop has now.
print "Hello world"
." Hello world " / .( Hello world )
By comparison, giving how they optimized the games for 8 and 16 bit machines I should have been able to compile Cataclysm DDA:BN under my potato netbook and yet it needs GIGABYTES of RAM to compile, it crazy that you need damn swap for something it required far less RAM 15 years ago for the same features.
If the game was reimplemented in Golang it wouldn't feel many times slower. But no, we are suffering the worst from both sides of the coin: something that should have been replaced by Inferno -plan9 people, the C and Unix creators and now Golang, their cousin- with horrible compiline times, horrible and incompatible ABI's, featuritis, crazy syntax with templates and if you are lucky, memory safety.
Meanwhile I wish the forked Inferno/Purgatorio got a seamless -no virtual desktops- mode so you fired the application in a VM integrated with the guest window manager -a la Java- and that's it. Limbo+Tk+Sqlite would have been incredible for CRUD/RAD software once the GUI was polished up a little, with sticky menus as TCL/Tk and the like. In the end, if you know Golang you could learn Limbo's syntax (same channels too) with ease.
But for some reason, Firefox refuses to play back those kinds of files.
> By comparison, giving how they optimized the games for 8 and 16 bit machines I should have been able to compile Cataclysm DDA:BN under my potato netbook and yet it needs GIGABYTES of RAM to compile, it crazy that you need damn swap for something it required far less RAM 15 years ago for the same features.
That’s not crazy. You’re comparing interpreted, line delimited, ASCII, with a compiler that converts structured ASCII into machine code.
The two processes are as different to one another as a driving a bus is to being a passenger on it.
I don’t understand what your point is in the next two paragraphs. What Go, TCL, UNIX nor Inferno have to do with the C64 or modern software. So you’ll have to help out there.
And that reason is because x264 is a free and open source implementation of the H.264 codec, and you still need to pay a license to use the patented technology regardless of how you do that. Using a free implementation of the code doesn't get you a free license for the codec.
The savings there would be negligible (in modern terms) but the development cost would be significantly increased.
> Of course more features and safety nets will consume memory, but we don't have to waste it like there are no other things running on the system, no?
Safety nets are not a waste. They’re a necessary cost of working with modern requirements. For example, If your personal details were stolen from a MITM attack then I’m sure you’d be asking why that piece of software wasn’t encrypting that data.
The real waste in modern software is:
1. Electron: but we are back to the cost of hiring developers
2. Application theming. But few actual users would want to go back to plain Windows 95 style widgets (many, like myself, on HN wouldn’t mind, but we are a niche and not the norm).
> This demo [0] is a 4kB executable. 4096 bytes. A single file. All assets, graphics, music and whatnot, and can run at high resolutions with real time rendering.
You quoted where i said that modern resolutions are literally orders of magnitude greater and assets stored in bitmaps / PCM then totally ignored that point.
When you wrote audio data in the 80s, you effectively wrote midi files in machine code. Obviously it wasn’t literally midi, but you’d describe notes, envelopes etc. You’d very very rarely store that audio as a waveform because audio chips then simply don’t support a high enough bitrate to make that audio sound good (nor had the storage space to save it). Whereas these days, PCM (eg WAV, MP3, FLAC, etc) sound waaaay better than midi and are much easier for programmers to work with. But even a 2 second long 16bit mono PCM waveform is going to be more than 4KB.
And modern graphics aren’t limited to 2 colour sprites (more colours were achieved via palette swapping) at 8x8 pixels. Scale that up to 32bits (not colours, bits) and you’re increasing the colour depth by literally 32 times. And that’s before you scale again from 64 pixels to thousands of pixels.
You’re then talking exponential memory growth in all dimensions.
I’ve written software for those 80s systems and modern systems too. And it’s simply ridiculous to Compare graphics and audio of those systems to modern systems without taking into account the differences in resolution, colour depth, and audio bitrates.
320x200 being an area of screen not much larger than a postage stamp on my 4k monitor.
The technical leap from 40 years ago never fails to astound me.
Those are the systems we are talking about though.
> but they certainly did exist on large time-sharing systems used in universities and industry and government. And those systems had only a tiny fraction of the memory that a typical x86-64 laptop has now.
Actually this systems didn’t. In the early 80s most protocols were still ASCII based. Even remote shell connections weren’t encrypted. Remember that SSH wasn’t released until 1995. Likewise for SSL.
Time sharing systems were notoriously bad for sandboxing users too. Smart pointers, while available since the 60s, weren’t popularised in C++ until the 90s. Memory overflow bugs were rife (and still are) in C-based languages.
If you were using Fortran or ALGOL, then it was a different story. But by the time the 80s came around, mainframe OSs weren’t being written in FORTRAN / ALGOL any longer. Software running on top of it might, but you’re still at the mercy of all that insecure C code running beneath it.
Also the Amiga's have AmiSSL and it will run on a 68040 or some FPGA with same constraints. IRC over TLS, Gemini, JS-less web, Usenet, EMail... not requiring tons of GB.
Nowadays even the Artemis crew can't properly launch Outlook. If I were the IT manager I'd just set Claws-mail/thunderbird with file attachments, MSMTP+ISYNC as backends (caching and batch sending/receiving emails, you know, high end technology inspired by the 80's) and NNCP to relay packets where cuts in space are granted and thus NNCP can just push packets on demand.
The cost? my Atom n270 junk can run NNCP and it's written in damn Golang. Any user can understand Thunderbird/Claws Mail. They don't need to setup anything, the IT manager would set it all and the mail client would run seamlessly, you know, with a fancy GUI for everything.
Yet we are suffering the 'wonders' of vibe coding and Electron programmers pushing fancy tecnology where the old one would just work as it's tested like crazy.
That C64 demo doing sprite wizardy and 8088MPH comes to my mind. The latter one, as you most probably know, can't be emulated since it (ab)uses hardware directly. :D
As a trivia: After watching .the .product, I declared "if a computer can do this with a 64kB binary, and people can make a computer do this, I can do this", and high performance/efficient programming became my passion.
From any mundane utility to something performance sensitive, that demo is my northern star. The code I write shall be as small, performant and efficient as possible while cutting no corners. This doesn't mean everything is written in assembly, but utmost care is given how something I wrote works and feels while it's running.
I think it's a valid view that (a) we have way more resources and (b) sometimes they are badly used in ways that results in systems being perceptibly slower than the C64 sometimes, when measured in raw latency between user input and interaction response. Usually because of some crippling system bottleneck that everything is forced through.
The AmiSSL came out long after the C64 was a relic and required hardware that was an order of magnitude more powerful than the C64 ;)
...and this effort and small savings here and there is what brings the massive savings at the end of the day. Electron is what "4KB here and there won't hurt", "JS is a very dynamic language so we can move fast", and "time to market is king, software is cheap, network is reliable, YOLO!" banged together. It's a big "Leeroy Jenkins!" move in the worst possible sense, making users pay everyday with resources and lost productivity to save a developer a couple of hours at most.
Users are not cattle to milk, they and their time/resources also deserve respect. Electron is doing none of that.
> You quoted where i said that modern resolutions are literally orders of magnitude greater and assets stored in bitmaps / PCM then totally ignored that point.
Did you watch or ran any of these demos? Some (if not all) of them scale to 4K and all of them have more than two colors. All are hardware accelerated, too.
> And modern graphics aren’t limited to 2 colour sprites (more colours were achieved via palette swapping) at 8x8 pixels. Scale that up to 32bits (not colours, bits) and you’re increasing the colour depth by literally 32 times. And that’s before you scale again from 64 pixels to thousands of pixels.
Sorry to say that, but I know what graphics and high performance programming entails. Had two friends develop their own engines, and I manage HPC systems. I know how much memory matrices need, because everything is matrices after some point.
> Safety nets are not a waste.
I didn't say they are waste. That quote is out of context. Quoting my comment's first paragraph, which directly supports the part you quoted: "Yes, but this doesn't prevent you from being mindful and selecting the right tools with smaller memory footprint while providing the features you need."
So, what I argue is, you don't have to bring in everything and the kitchen sink if all you need is a knife and a cutting board. Bring in the countertop and some steel gloves to prevent cutting yourself.
> I’ve written software for those 80s systems and modern systems too. And it’s simply ridiculous to Compare graphics and audio of those systems to modern systems without taking into account the differences in resolution, colour depth, and audio bitrates.
Me too. I also record music and work on high performance code. While they are not moving much, I take photos and work on them too, so I know what happens under the hood.
Just watch the demos. It's worth your time.
DES was standardised in '77. In use, before that. SSL was not the first time the world adopted encrypted protocols.
The NSA wouldn't have weakened the standard, it was something nobody used.
Also DES is trivial to crack because it has a short key length.
Longer keys require more compute power and thus the system requirements to handle encryption increase as the hardware to decrypt becomes more powerful.
I agree. I even said Electron was one piece of bloat I didn’t agree with my my comment. So it wasn’t factored into the calculations I was presenting to you.
> Did you watch or ran any of these demos? Some (if not all) of them scale to 4K and all of them have more than two colors.
You mean the ones you added after I replied?
> I didn't say they are waste. That quote is out of context.
Every part of your comment was quoted in my comment. Bar the stuff you added after I commented.
> Had two friends develop their own engines
I have friends who are doctors but that doesn’t mean I should be giving out medical advice ;)
> Just watch the demos. It's worth your time.
I’m familiar with the demo scene. I know what’s possible with a lot of effort. But writing cool effects for the demo scene is very different to writing software for a business which has to offset developer costs against software sales and delivery deadlines.
I’m also not advocating that software should be written in Electron. My point was modern software, even without Electron, is still going to be orders of magnitude larger in size and for the reasons I outlined.
> writing cool effects for the demo scene is very different to writing software for a business which has to offset developer costs against software sales and delivery deadlines.
The point is not "cool effects" and "infinite time" though. If we continue about talking farbrausch, they are not bunch of nerds which pump out raw assembly for effects. They have their own framework, libraries and whatnot. Not dissimilar to business software development. So, their code is not that different from a business software package.
For the size, while you can't fit a whole business software package to 64kB, you don't need to choose the biggest and most inefficient library "just because". Spending a couple of hours more, you might find a better library/tool which might allow you to create a much better software package, after all.
Again, for the third time, while safety nets and other doodads make software packages bigger, cargo culting and worshipping deadlines and ROI more than the product itself contributes more to software bloat. That's my point.
Oh I overlooked this gem:
> I have friends who are doctors but that doesn’t mean I should be giving out medical advice ;)
Yet, we designed some part of that thing together, and I had the pleasure of fighting with GPU drivers with them trying to understand what it's trying to do while neglecting our requests from it.
IOW, yep, I didn't wrote one, but I was neck deep in both of them, for years.
Which isn’t the same thing as what I said.
I’m not suggesting you did it maliciously, but the fact remains they were added afterwards so it’s understandable I missed them.
> Yet, we designed some part of that thing together, and I had the pleasure of fighting with GPU drivers with them trying to understand what it's trying to do while neglecting our requests from it.
That is quite a bit different from your original comment though. This would imply you also worked on game engines and it wasn’t just your friends.