Flagship - Linux 256 bytes (Revision 2021)

Third tiny graphics program showing a fractal shadow among a widening sea of cloudy stars, the algorithm is similar to Minsky circle algorithm.

This one is still C but with a 32 bits executable, improving upon Truespace i improved my C framework to produce 32 bits ELF, this basically boosted the amount of bytes available by two for the graphics code which is ~150 bytes here.

There was a choice issue on this one because i finally had enough bytes to implement most of my Minsky circle sketches so i just needed to chose one that could fit.

I also had another issue so far which was that all my previous releases didn't works with saturated arithmetic for the pixels so it looked bad after some times, most of the time was perhaps spent on trying to do saturated arithmetic on packed pixels with SIMD instructions via intrinsics which i never used before. There is some way to do it without SIMD but it result in a bigger binary from my tests, perhaps with MMX ?

Using intrinsics works great but it also added a 5 bytes overhead due to the pshufd instruction being generated that my program had no uses... i was aware of that much later so there is 5 bytes wasted for pretty much all my releases up to "Apollonian".

Colors are perhaps too monotone but i couldn't figure out how to do it better at the time, i felt that the colors should be improved for my next release though.

The result change with the resolution, it is much more visually pleasing at 1536x864 but couldn't manage to shrink it enough in time, i now know it is totally possible and easy to fit the one below in 256 bytes.

1536x864 version, much more visually pleasing