I spent three days disassembling Guillermo Sais's 142-byte winner, which was challenging to understand. My notes may be of interest; they are in gsais-pong.md in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git/
I hope this is not interpreted as any kind of criticism. I would much rather be responsible for maintaining Joshi's code than Sais's. But I suspect that most people who are interested in either work will be interested in the other.
amiga386 1 days ago [-]
"No operating system. [...] Just [...] BIOS". Hmm.
Out of interest, is there a difference in environment between running a COM executable for MS-DOS versus running a bootblock? I know there's the whole of MS-DOS, but a typical size-coded demo (http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/DOS) will only use int 10h to switch mode, and that's it. Everything else is IO mapped (e.g. the keyboard) or memory mapped (e.g. screen memory). Could these equally run as a bootblock, and vice-versa?
One difference I know of is that DOS maintains an ever-increasing timer that it writes to 0:046C... is that available at bootblock execution time?
CrociDB 1 days ago [-]
As far as I know yes, but with some minor changes, like the the position to be loaded in memory (`org 0x7c00` for bootloaders and I think `org 0x100` for DOS) and the fact that it needs to be exactly 512bytes to boot.
joenot443 1 days ago [-]
This is cool!
BTW I checked out your Github and tried the link to your personal site - looks like the www prefix isn't working.
www.akshatjoshi.com fails but akshatjoshi.com works. Gotta fix those A records!
matsz 2 days ago [-]
It's probably one of the best introductory projects to x86 assembly on bare metal.
some ideas:
- could try to add another player. just need to map 4 more keys. IO should be fine doing it the same way (dont think itd need thread or whatever) the io is super fast in the qemu scenario.
- rather than have this in the MBR. make an MBR where you can select this sector to load as next sector and jump, maybe even with ability to return.
*you can then expose other games too if ud ever be bothered for snake or minesweeper :D
just some tinkering ideas. cool project and hats off. its always more tricky than it looks these things!
mg794613 1 days ago [-]
Tomorrow it's my turn to pretend to have written this!
Barry-Perkins 1 days ago [-]
Pong in 512 bytes — boot, play, amaze
22 hours ago [-]
anthk 1 days ago [-]
Now that I see this, I'd curious if something like Nethack 3.4.3 or Slashem could be rewritten in T3X0 and be playable under 286 machines:
There's a working Rogue port for Minix2 under a 16 bit CPU (and for the Z Machine too, and GBA, and several others...), but I think even Hack 1.0.3 would be too big to fit under a 286 with 640k.
It would be a good start if Nethack 1.3d got working under CP/M for instance, rewritten with T3X0 and some ASM hacks for speeds...
fl7305 1 days ago [-]
You could easily write a RISC-V CPU emulator for your older/smaller machines, and run the original Nethack code compiled to RISC-V.
anthk 1 days ago [-]
Under a 286? At time-freezing speeds. Minix 2 under a homebrew 16 bit CPU already was so-so
in usability:
Would be interesting if even a Z80 could run Nethack in a CPU emulator.
anthk 1 days ago [-]
Nethack 1.3c, maybe. The first release, I mean, the inmediate one after Hack 1.0.3 under BSD's.
That with a lot of patience. Nethack 3.4.3... I doub't it even DOS could handle it with 640k and a 286.
Andrew-Tate 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 21:28:22 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Run it: nasm -f bin pong.asm -o boot.bin qemu-system-x86_64 boot.bin
GitHub: https://github.com/akshat666/-bootponggame
You can add it to the list at https://gist.github.com/XlogicX/8204cf17c432cc2b968d138eb639... I think there are already at least two Pong game there.
I spent three days disassembling Guillermo Sais's 142-byte winner, which was challenging to understand. My notes may be of interest; they are in gsais-pong.md in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git/
I hope this is not interpreted as any kind of criticism. I would much rather be responsible for maintaining Joshi's code than Sais's. But I suspect that most people who are interested in either work will be interested in the other.
Out of interest, is there a difference in environment between running a COM executable for MS-DOS versus running a bootblock? I know there's the whole of MS-DOS, but a typical size-coded demo (http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/DOS) will only use int 10h to switch mode, and that's it. Everything else is IO mapped (e.g. the keyboard) or memory mapped (e.g. screen memory). Could these equally run as a bootblock, and vice-versa?
One difference I know of is that DOS maintains an ever-increasing timer that it writes to 0:046C... is that available at bootblock execution time?
BTW I checked out your Github and tried the link to your personal site - looks like the www prefix isn't working.
www.akshatjoshi.com fails but akshatjoshi.com works. Gotta fix those A records!
More advanced than my attempt: https://github.com/mat-sz/pongloader
BTW: You could provide a live online demo using v86 - https://github.com/copy/v86
some ideas: - could try to add another player. just need to map 4 more keys. IO should be fine doing it the same way (dont think itd need thread or whatever) the io is super fast in the qemu scenario.
- rather than have this in the MBR. make an MBR where you can select this sector to load as next sector and jump, maybe even with ability to return. *you can then expose other games too if ud ever be bothered for snake or minesweeper :D
just some tinkering ideas. cool project and hats off. its always more tricky than it looks these things!
https://t3x.org/t3x/0/
There's a working Rogue port for Minix2 under a 16 bit CPU (and for the Z Machine too, and GBA, and several others...), but I think even Hack 1.0.3 would be too big to fit under a 286 with 640k.
It would be a good start if Nethack 1.3d got working under CP/M for instance, rewritten with T3X0 and some ASM hacks for speeds...
https://homebrewcpu.com/
Would be interesting if even a Z80 could run Nethack in a CPU emulator.