Can you fit a whole game on a stamp?

Can you fit a game onto a new digital stamp?
💭 All views are my own 💭
For the curious (and brave):
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
Article for small ELF executables - www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/...

[@robigan]

I came to this video thinking that you'd stop at C, just like all the other lower level programmers do, was shocked by the level of optimization you pulled off. This video is worthy of being shared

[@nathanbaggs]

Thanks! I really wanted to get < 500 bytes and assembly was the only way to do that

[@grugiv]

@@nathanbaggsWell, you certainly hit that goal!

[@trentwelch1116]

Matkc did with a QR code it pretty cool just like this one

[@williamdrum9899]

The virgin C vs the Chad Assembly

[@Nerdthagoras]

So it is indeed possible for a person to compile better than a compiler haha.@@nathanbaggs

[@jitlua]

"British MattKC doesn't exist, he can't hurt you." British MattKC:

[@The_Grammar_Police]

The funny thing is that his video is at the top of my recommended

[@michaelnewman6948]

This is a very similar video concept to MattKC when he made a game to fit in a QR code (kzbin.info/www/bejne/e6naooGomtSWpsk) but your individual approaches, limitations, and styles add additional intrigue into both videos.

[@somebody3271]

That's the video I was thinking about when I saw this video

[@2009MazdaRX8]

@@somebody3271 same lmao

[@RealNotGoldArc]

​@@somebody3271YO SAME

[@HeidenLam]

chances are he took at least some inspiration from Matt's video, which is nice as he revised the concept refreshingly and enjoyably

[@RadikAlice]

And then there's Dave's Garage, who saw it and thought "Neat, could be more optimized tho" And he did it, well worth a watch as well

[@jumanji4037]

This was a joy to watch, just seeing the size of the executable shrink more and more as you got to assembly was interesting. You're game could essentially fit in a boot sector now. I had no clue that a frame buffer file existed in Linux until now, I might mess around with it thanks to your video.

[@nathanbaggs]

Thanks! I used an Ubuntu VM and had to run it terminal only (as any GUI/compositor overwrites the file) and had to make sure my user was added to the “video” group

[@jumanji4037]

@@nathanbaggs Thanks for the info!

[@sanderbos4243]

That cdq is amazing, I love how far you went optimizing it!

[@nathanbaggs]

I really wanted to get below 500 bytes

[@sanderbos4243]

@@nathanbaggs Chad mindset

[@mikkelens]

everywhere I go I see your face

[@sanderbos4243]

@@mikkelens One day I'll be coronated as the new Justin Y. of comment sections, Mikkel

[@StephenHall-zz2ym]

Would using a TUI be smaller?

[@peterlilliegeo]

Man this is gold!! I'm a high-level lang programmer, so seeing you work so smoothly in C and assembly was enlightening! The way you explained it all helped me follow along as well. Thanks for the entertainment and information!

[@nathanbaggs]

Thanks!

[@catrass7515]

MattKC QR code game, hard mode

[@GlitchyOfficial]

mattkc making "can you make a game in a qr code"

[@nbee99]

literally MattKC Inspiration, but I know how hard it is to make a video so, good! 👍👍

[@joaomartins2541]

MattKC is inspiration to us all.

[@pizzaboxer]

british mattkc 💀💀💀

[@alicewyan]

This is old school levels of wizardry, impressive!

[@wonkywonky6307]

499 bytes?? GODDAMN! Congrats, this is much better than what I expected. Fantastic!

[@TeslaPixel]

Great video as per. The size minimisation methods at the end were brilliant with some methods I'd not even thought of. There was a really interesting, similar video about pong on a QR code I'd recommend having a watch of also.

[@nathanbaggs]

It was good fun trying to squeeze the last few bytes out (:

[@itsCh4rl1e]

Dunno if you've seen anything by Ben Eater but he recently(ish) went into some ancient asm code where bit-saving tricks weren't just a fun gimmick but a necessity of programming back in those times that you wouldn't imagine doing today given the immense size of software now. really interesting to see the ideas get re-investigated today.

[@nineinchwhales]

Your videos are always a treat to watch! Always feel like I'm learning one thing or another and the production quality is amazing :D

[@nathanbaggs]

Glad you like them!

[@sentienttoast1319]

I had predicted from the start that assembly would be required, but i would've been really impressed if the guy did it without assembly, still really nice job

[@atalocke]

I love these kind of videos. You have a great presentation!

[@nathanbaggs]

Thanks!

[@wyndmill]

Now that's what I call compression! The manual compression at the end was hilarious to watch

[@wisteela]

This confirms what I was thinking, that it's a data matrix, and now I know the type.

[@budgetarms]

TLDR: Yes, you can

[@AlphaetusPrime]

Hey, at least you fit it into a single hard drive sector! That's pretty good!

[@robosklegs]

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should

[@user-pw5do6tu7i]

NES devs fear him.

[@Sypaka]

"Oh, I collect stamps" - "Cool, what games do you have." - "huh?"

[@sky.is.winning]

Nice job NATHAN!

[@Voltra_]

After the QR Code game, there's the stamp game

[@codedeus]

Damn, that's some epic shrinking!

[@mrnobody9268]

really creative ways, great job

[@batatanna]

I'm crying over the triple nested goto

[@HexMedia2474]

you are a madman!❤️

[@EvilTim1911]

Man, the knowledge on display here is amazing. I work in fairly high level languages so a lot of this was very unfamiliar to me. Great stuff

[@2peoples785]

EVI-LL!!!

[@jomo_sh]

I'm curious, have you ever thought about doing low level programming? why do people often work with high level languages?

[@EvilTim1911]

@@jomo_sh Because they're easier to jump into, I guess. I've just started learning Rust and would like to build some personal projects with it, but I'll still mostly use high level languages professionally because that's what my job calls for (JS, Python and a little bit of C#). When I first started learning I went with Python as it was recommended for the simplicity of its syntax. Having to worry about manual memory management on top of all the other stuff you have to learn as a beginner would probably turn many people off right at the start.

[@placeholder4988]

@@jomo_sh low level is more machine oriented while high level more at the programmer. Afaik on a basic level you trade off performance (memory management) for easier debugging and easier programming

[@mattmurphy7030]

@@EvilTim1911you should understand C if you want to call yourself a developer. A basic understanding of how the machine works at that level is mandatory.

[@semplar2007]

woow that is a great optimization efforts 👏 well done

[@vast634]

I know the fun of cramming games into a very small filesize. I wrote several Java games (a platformer, a 3D game, voxelgame etc) into a 4 kilobyte file. Lots of tricks and procedural generation for graphics used. 70 bytes is extremely small. But 4 kilobytes lets you actually create a decent looking game.

[@Darkknight512]

Ahhh, the postage stamp class demoscene.

[@trentlangford9050]

I love this! Glad to see that assembly and low level is alive and well. If you don’t mind me asking, what tools did you use to write the assembly?

[@nathanbaggs]

I wrote it in VSCode and assembled it with nasm

[@unicodefox]

MattKC did a similar thing a few years ago, putting Win32 Snake in a QR code.

[@GearsDatapacks]

This is a very good video. I'm impressed you managed to get it down to less than 0.5KB

[@mv-kan]

Keep up the good work

[@Alanhallow]

This is amazing

[@Iota0zero2]

Inspiration from MattKC? But good work 👍🏼

[@damouze]

This brings me back to my university days when one of the admins asked if I could write a small program for him that would wipe the MBR of a harddrive in lab PC. I managed to squeeze it in a whopping 94 bytes, including a double confirmation by the operator. Since technically I had an entire floppy boot sector's worth of space, I filled the rest with credits and kudos to my fellow students. The admin was quite happy with it, and used it for many years.

[@Cuperino]

I hadn’t heard of these techniques since I learned about how Atari games were made. It’s cool to see these can be done on Linux!

[@hexagonist23]

writing directly to /dev/fb0 is so cursed yet so simple to do

[@nathanbaggs]

I was kind of surprised how simple it was (conceptually). I had to run Linux in terminal only as compositors and window managers seem to override the fb0 changes

[@TeamUnpro]

OMG you're writing to /dev/fb0

[@flameofthephoenix8395]

The best way to compress games is to create a special compression system that can only handle storing a single combination of bits that just so happens to correspond to your entire game you're needing to compress, how fortunate.

[@sdjhgfkshfswdfhskljh3360]

Looks like you describe MetaGolfScript.

[@flameofthephoenix8395]

​@@sdjhgfkshfswdfhskljh3360 Yes, I hadn't heard of them before now. So here, I'll fix it. The compression algorithm stores it in two bits and has four possible programs to be compressed, one of them just so happens to be yours and the other three are random arbitrary combinations of assembly code that don't actually do anything except probably break things.

[@FeTetra]

the fact that you got so optimized that you used other data in the file to not use extra data for colors is insane

[@kyxey]

Bruh started hight level and ended up tree shaking the CPU instructions. 💀

[@tsalVlog]

I haven't done assembly-level optimization in ... 30 years? coincidentally it was the last time I ever took a job that included x86 assembly work.

[@nathanbaggs]

Always a useful skill to have, even if it’s just to debug native code

[@tsalVlog]

@@nathanbaggs oh definitely. I work in Swift now, and it has helped immensely with identifying problems others have struggled with.

[@bitwise4996]

upx compression is literal magic. I wonder if it works on even smaller bins.

[@achille0072]

This was so good, I really gotta learn assembly. Also, is there anyway I could read the source code?

[@arpy8]

amazing work

[@nathanbaggs]

Thanks a lot!

[@Madnessnunky]

This reminds me of the kinds of tricks employed by NES devs. (And other retro PC/Console devs.) I wish developers had a fraction of this level of optimization today. Instead it's 80GB with a 20GB day 1 patch for an installed 120GB. Like, there wasn't ANY space you could save??? GameHut did a ton of cool videos about compression for things like the FMV in Sonic 3D Blast and other neat tricks in the Genesis days. People were so creative when given limits.

[@teamruddy611]

1:59 OH NO! THE PROGRAM IS GOING TO SUBSCRIBE!!! WHAT SHOULD WE DO!!!

[@andrew8293]

Game Developers now: The base game download will be 60GB and 100GB when unconpressed. Game developers then:

[@everypizza]

Genshin is around 200 GB (I'm not sure, but it won't fit on my 128 GB SSD anymore)

[@Patisaloser]

​@@everypizzait's 300mb

[@MAP233224]

Great vid, I kinda would've love to see just one more step: self decompressed/extracting executable, just to see if it could've been tinified a bit more, 500 bytes is already quite impressive! Is the fb0 file the simplest way to write to the screen on Linux? I'd like to write a very simple software renderer with the Debian distro

[@nathanbaggs]

I looked into decompressing but I couldn't get the extractor+compression any smaller than 500 bytes. It's probably the simplest, but not necessary the most efficient, you also need to run terminal only as any windowing/compositing managers tend to overrule the fb0 file

[@hridumdhital]

"Write this essay using the least amount of words possible"

[@Pillow_]

1:40 as a windows user, *wow*, that's a cool feature

[@koftabalady]

I always wonder how you learned assembly or these cool low level stuff... can you tell us your story?

[@salman0ansari]

haha this is amazing

[@ariqahmer5188]

Could you put this on a QR code just so I can relax and know that there's an entire game on it 😅

[@compechdev]

This is what converting nested else-ifs to switch case feels like to AAA game developers.

[@naptimusnapolyus1227]

an Insane Optimization level that is 🗿

[@john.dough.]

I wanted to see it printed on actual stamps...

[@unrue1048]

I wonder what happens to the post office it when you print out a qr code that says ;DROP ALL TABLES; --

[@a.r.9496]

I am actually sure you could‘ve pulled it off with a different game. Would have been cool seeing you print out the qr code and puttin it ontop of a stamp

[@caittastic]

where are you getting the specifications of the new stamp barcodes?

[@orange-vlcybpd2]

Now i understand why modern triple A games run with barely 60 fps on 5k $ gaming setups..

[@TheeBuddylee]

You got me, I went to Subscribe

[@KozelPraiseGOELRO]

Fool, you still could optimize it to a quater. With magic.

[@iyoe]

Nice

[@MarkPentler]

I had a piece of Arduino code once that used only one variable, and I ended up using a spare register to store the value instead, meaning no variable memory was used at all. Tidy.

[@RyanLynch1]

very impressive. do you have a background in binary analysis?

[@randomuseryt5143]

"mov al,0x5" is 2 bytes (b0 05), saves 3 bytes but doesnt zero the upper 3 bytes of eax

[@ejonesss]

1. 70 bytes is enough for basic malware so it could be possible to put malware into the postal system. of course i am sure that may be very illegal and the penalties for crimes against the postal system is so high that maybe no one has ever tried anything

[@luna010]

great video. I feel inspired to have my try at making a similar game, but making a uefi(PE) executable instead of a linux(ELF) executable. I’ll leave it in a reply if I succeed. I’m curious how the different environments may differ in terms of code size.

[@nathanbaggs]

Good luck!

[@joaopetersonscheffer]

maybe try a simple run length encoding to try and fit it on 2 stamps? 2 physical stamps? maybe the royal mail might even make a special set of stamps, find 2 and play a game hahaha

[@nathanbaggs]

I tried a run length encoding but the decompressing code plus the compressed payload were still bigger than 500 bytes

[@joaopetersonscheffer]

@@nathanbaggs oh, that's a shame, still, very impressive

[@frankbose544]

one day i wanna be as good as you at c lol

[@Budch]

Sure thing, you can fit the whole technodemo on it, people have been doing that since the 60s!

[@skyr3x]

i have never seen someone rewrite their entire code in assembly and embedding their variables in elf headers where the exact data is arbitrary. this is so sick

[@Arnau478]

I'm thinking it may be possible to avoid having the "/dev/fb0" string at all if you could somehow access the major number of the device and then look for a file with that inode in the devfs

[@jaques3]

how do these sizes compare to really old games like from the zx spectrum or something like that?

[@televisedfeedback6660]

It'd be neat to see what game you could fit into the largest qr code (2,973 bytes). Enough room to fit almost 6 of this project. Some guy made snake in that. Perhaps an ascii form of pacman might fit? Or a bare bones Tetris? It'll be cool to see if people take up the challenge for the best and most polished game they can fit in a qr code. Though not to the extent of kkrieger (Fitting a whole 3d game into 97kb through utter madness and trickery.) That team was crazy. Now I wonder what they could've fit in 2.9 Kb. XD

[@lel7531]

So no stamp game ? That's too bad

[@tomtravis858]

Putting the string in the headers was genius, awesome video!

[@keiyakins]

Honestly, 90 characters is a tough ask in a scripting language. I'd like to see if you can cram a python implementation into that size!

[@Toby-ve6gp]

that isn't a bar code

[@unknown-yo2tx]

could use a game engine that allows for code golfing

[@szabolcsmate5254]

I was fully expecting you to make a guess the number type CLI game. But then, what's the smalled CLI game that one could write? You are allowed to include a imaginary printed manual to get away with a very non-user-friendly implementation. Like guess the number with a ? prompt, and ^/v/= as feedback maybe?

[@AlphiumProductions]

So optimizied you could run it on an Abacus

[@nathanbaggs]

Maybe next video…

[@yash1152]

0:40 is this a repost? one channel already did this thing years ago!

[@Gamer_55-55]

sounds like what matt kc did

[@letronix6243]

You watched mattkc but thought: "I can do smaller".

[@Patisaloser]

While also stealing his script and giving zero credit👏

[@StealthyDrake12]

Pong??

[@InfiniteCoder01]

Why you didn't put source assembly in the description?

[@isheamongus811]

Consider more native. Like boot sector. Ignoring Windows etc

[@TF2Shows]

What about compression?

[@nathanbaggs]

I tried but couldn’t get the decompression code and the compressed payload close to 500 bytes

[@VarunGupta3009]

I thought you're the same guy that did it with a QR code, but glad that you were more realistic and also optimised it extremely well.

[@-stoner]

No but you could

[@YHK_YT]

1:05 please lower the sound effects it genuinely hurts

[@m4rt_]

MattKC :)