The futer of 256 :(

[rain_storm]

I was looking through some of the 256b intros on Pirx's website and came across the pdf file at the bottom of this page
http://66.102.9.104/translate_c?hl=en&sl=pl&u=http://ind.untergrund.net/&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dart_256b.pdf%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1T4GGLJ_enIE274IE274

To summarize it basically states how amazing pieces of art can be crammed into 256 bytes and with the onset of Vista this niche will become a thing of the past

I just cant shake the idea of the scene losing out on some fabulous tiny code as being a bad thing. I just dont want to see this die, I personnaly think that this category has become one of the least appreciated categories too. Just take a look at pouet and see what they have to say about 90% of all <256b demos. Its not good. But in order to get something good up and running in this category requires alot of experience about the target environment (in this case MS-DOS using a VGA display adapter), and more dirty tricks than the CIA and FBI combined.

So whats in store for the futer? Are we being forced to use DosBox... perish the thought cos DosBox is the worst way to view these demos. Perhaps 512b boot sectors will become the new 256b intros. this is even more niche than the current state of affairs since not many XP systems have Floppy drives and Vista is the same. still I think this is one possible direction. If boot sectors are the futer of tiny tiny code than Im gonna have to learn how to set a video mode by hand which may take as many as 256 bytes to achieve. I'll leave that until I have no other options. Thankfully there will still be places like 256b / intro inferno / hard code / pouet and of course dbfinteractive.

Anyone want to try cheering me up over this one

[Shockwave]

Someone need to write a decent dos emulator that runs these beautiful little intros properly.

I'd hate to see these small intros die too.

Yep, I know that there is dos box, but it's a pain in the arse.
A tool that you can just drop a 256kb intro onto and it runs perfect would be brill.

I wont upgrade to vista unless I absolutely had to btw.

And one other nail in the coffin is that a lot of cards nowadays dont even support 13h.

[Jim]

Installing MSDOS in VirtualPC or VMWare is as good as it gets at the moment.  But I don't like installing them on my PC - they take up a lot of resources.

Jim

[Meduusa]

Whats wrong with dosbox i know it dosent run all the intros at the moment but its getting better and better all the time.
Personally I use a qemu with MSDOS-6.22 and Win98 installed and Ive been able to run most dos demos Ive tried and it dosent take even much resources about 14mb whitout virtual disk.

[rain_storm]

I can point to quite a few demos that Iv made that do not run on DosBox the same way they run in XPs built in Dos emulation (which is not perfect but it is a lot better). I will give you one example ...
I may choose to do some buffer based effect like a nice smoke effect. So I point one of my segment registers to video memory and the other one I point to some random segment of memory that already contains some non zero values that are safe to read write. These non zero bytes start the ball rolling for free which eliminates having to do any randomisation. but in dosbox they will be all zeros making a blank screen or at best some effect that certainly doesnt look like what was intended.
Generally it is a good emulator so long as the program is going about things in a manner that is considered good practise. 256 byters have to work around these good practises to get the file size down. DosBox is only interested in emulating the old Dos games which it does brilliantly but I dont think DosBox have any plans to even attempt to support these demos

[Jim]

The problems are things like high-resolution timer, h-sync, v-sync and other joys such as paged mode on the video card, and switching palette registers during the display.

So I point one of my segment registers to video memory and the other one I point to some random segment of memory that already contains some non zero values that are safe to read write

Apart from the BIOS area, which areas do you expect to contain data you can use for a seed?  I can't imagine anything above 0xa:0000 having anything guaranteed as useful.

Jim

[rain_storm]

lds ax,[di] does the trick whatever value is contained at the dword of [di] many offsets above cs+0D00 contain some garbage here. there are blank spots though above A000 that you cannot read to for some reason