Hi, (I'm late to reply to this, sorry!!)
On Fri, May 5, 2017 at 12:33 PM, Andreas K. Foerster <a...@akfoerster.de> wrote: > > I have written a small "four in a row" game. > Some may know this game under the name "connect four", > > It's small and not very exciting, but maybe you DOS-people > find it usefull. Useful? No. Entertaining? Yes. :-) > http://akfoerster.de/dl/akf-software/row4.zip > > Background: > > I'm always fascinated with small programs, small as can be. > Then I came across Bruce's C compiler. I read it could cross-compile > for DOS, but only up to 64kB. I think it's "small" memory model (64 kb code + 64 kb data/stack) but indeed limited to 64 kb .COM output. > My first thought was that this is very > small... But then I thought, wait a minute... my very first computer > only had 16kB of RAM. At that time 64kB wasn't considered small at all! 64 kb is indeed a lot of code ... but only in assembly. HLLs tend to bloat up a lot more (esp. due to "dumb" linkers or big and complicated functions like printf). > So, I started a journey to explore, what I could do with such an > "enormous memory"... > > You should never judge a program by the size of the binary. Alignment also wastes a ton these days. People will tolerate huge binaries in the vain hope of more speed. (UPX, FTW!) > In fact in the beginnig this program was actually larger with less > functionality, until I started to optimize it. I don't know Forth, but I think it's the king of small code. There are some insanely talented Forth developers, but indeed a lot of it is very arcane and hard to use. Still, they seem to know all the tricks in the book. They excel at cramming everything into one small "kernel". ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
