Oh, you just slapped a 1MB image on your web page? That’s nice.

Back in the day, folks were hiding running code and data in the graphics of their games that had to fit into 22KB.

https://revs.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/hidden_secrets_of_the_custom_screen_mode.html

#BBCMicro #games #rev #dev

@aral I had a pale blue sky and pale green grass with grey track in my version of Revs...

Acorn user had a guide to building a clever bit of hardware that could map the rgb onto other colours. It was a couple of components on a vero board connected to the user port (for configuring it). Once set, it just worked

I built it with a mate one weekend and we were so chuffed it actually worked. I can't for the life of me remember the name of it though, but it would have been 1989 or 1990 I think

@aral @Pionir
There is an annual game jam competition that tries to keep this spirit going. It is called JS13K, and the aim is to make a web browser game that fits into 13 KB.

I cannot find why 13KB was chosen as the limitation, but it might be something to do with reducing number of segments (or packages for simplicity) that needed to be transferred from the server to client. Even though TCP's limit is 64kb per package, someone found that 16kb is more acceptable by most routers. My speculation is that game jam planners took that as the size limitation for the competition, and challenge developers to fit their game into a single TCP/IP package. Since some of this 16kb is overhead needed to get the payload across, actual payload ends up being 13kb and some fraction. I am not sure if that is the actual reason for this choice, but it sure makes a reasonable limitation for a, challenging and fun competition.

In reality, different internet layers have different segment size limitations and those TCP packages will end up broken into smaller sizes anyway, but there is something interesting seeing that a whole game load faster than some static sites.

https://js13kgames.com/
#js13k #game #gamejam
js13kGames

Check out js13kGames, the coding competition for web game developers, with a hallmark 13KB size limit.

js13kGames 2025