"Enchanted" is a 256 bytes(!) program that achieved 2nd place at this years "Revision" 256 bytes competition. The music you hear is also produced by these 256 bytes of code.
Author here, i quickly threw together a Python Port on Google Colab which also can generate an animated GIF. It's not meant to be perfectly coded or exactly emulating the assembler instructions, it just produces the same image(s)
Lovebyte 2025 was a sizecoding competition held online from 15. to 16. February this year. They were hosting many size restricted competitions - going from 32 bytes to 1024 bytes, where coders from all around the world could anonymously submit entries to compete against each other. The 64 byte competition was won by "Starpath", a tiny animated raycaster showing curved 3D geometry with fake lighting, a copper night sky and a few tiny stars, while playing ambient wind sound over the speakers. In the download archive you will find different versions together with commented source code, the smallest one -only 55 bytes- is shown and explained in short (t)here
From 8.9 - 10.9. the yearly "Function" Demoscene Event
with coding competitions was held in Budapest/Hungary
https://2023.function.hu/
The winner of this years 256 byte intro competition:
"Farewell" A 256 bytes intro for MSDOS
showcasing four different real time 3D scenes(!)
together with a soothing e-piano soundtrack
The winner of this years 256 byte intro competition
a 256 bytes intro for MSDOS, showcasing four
different real time 3D scenes together with
a soothing e-piano soundtrack
zooming rotating animation of an earth like textured planet with music, all generated from 256 bytes of x86 binary code for MS Dos, written in plain assembler
"...The submitted version (62 bytes) works as is in MS/FreeDos
it is very fast though. There is another version without
sound, synced to the timer, which is 44 bytes, also working
on all Dos Versions. A size way lower than 40 bytes can be
achieved with cutting alignment and color mapping..."
(https://www.pouet.net/prod_nfo.php?which=86986)
(source included in the link, writeup will follow) To my knowledge, the first implementation ever in 32 bytes. This builds upon the 65 bytes version of Vladislav Kaipetsky, Tenie Remmel and Mark Andreas from 1998.
Over 20 years ago I made a 2-player graphical worm game for DOS. I still have it in a zip. It is 123 bytes long and back then I couldn't squeeze more out of it.
After reading that writeup I feel like there's so much bloat in that 123 bytes!
I did the same thing! The year was 1997. There was some kind of online coding competition back then if I recall correctly. Mine is larger (256 bytes) but it has a nice background image (a mandelbrot fractal). Here is the binary:
It is a base64 encoded highly optimized x86 assembly in DOSBox emulator inside a Javascript VM Chrome browser inside my Windows 10 Sandbox Nested Hyper-V VM inside VMware Workstation inside my Windows 10 machine.
Those are both VMs in the same sense. A VM creates an abstract, indirect implementation of a computing system. Sometimes that's with a lot of hardware offload as in Xen or picojava. Sometimes that's with a JIT as in HotSpot, orginal VMWare, or Transmeta. Sometimes that's just with an interpreter like the original JVM or Dosbox.
They're all virtual machines whether they're running code originally meant for execution on hardware or not.
Copy that to a file and then: "base64 -d blah.txt > worms.com"
Make sure there are no spaces in the beginning of the lines.
This is from the original document:
"This is a version of the worm game for two players.
Game objective is to stay alive longer than the other worm!
You die if you eat yourself, ie. you are going RIGHT and you press LEFT.
Move the worm with the following keys:
PLAYER A: (topmost worm)
W
A D
S
PLAYER B: (lower worm)
I
J L
K
Winner is indicated by player letter, "A" or "B".
An even game is indicated by a "C". An even game means that the worms
ate each others heads, and nobody won."
I have to say, you really are an amazing coder. I read your write up for “memories.” a few days ago and it completely blew my mind. Thanks for sharing your knowledge!
Youtube Capture -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3SgDwyblis
Revision Website -> https://2025.revision-party.net/blog/afterparty/
Code -> https://hellmood.111mb.de//enchanted.asm