256b demo – Function 2019

Some people think 256 bytes doesn’t enough for anything. To be prove they’re wrong just watch “Puls by Rrrola” or “Stainless Steel by Digimind” on Youtube. You can find more jaw-dropping products if you search for “256b demo”.

I created a simple waving-colors effect which was called color-plasma in the old demo days. As simple as it is but looks mesmerizing. I called it Hypnotize. If you watch it long enough you will know why.

Click to download from ftp.scene.org

How much is 256 bytes.

The Function 2019 was great. I haven’t been on a demoscene party since the late 90’s. Glad I met some old buddys, but overall everybody was friendly.

The whole story began after a nostalgic conversation about demoparties. After watching a few masterpieces on Youtube I had a feeling I wanted to go to the next party. As it turned out I had two weeks. It wasn’t enough to create a ground-breaking effect but should be enough to tweak some sine-cosine functions. First I wanted to verify the idea. I used a simple canvas in Delphi and accumulate a few sine/consine/sqrt functions to create an acceptable result. Then I was able to convert it to X86 assembly. The first version was well over the size limit. It took me some hours to reduce it to 256 bytes. You can download here the commented source-code if you’re interested. I compiled it with NASM.

This is how it looks:

I’m soo sad I had to skip Function 2020. I was too worried about the Covid status. I hope I will be there next year.