Truespace - Linux 256 bytes (Lovebyte 2021)

Probably shows best on video for the buildup.

This one is perhaps my poorest attempt, it is just static colored noise but i like the stars buildup somehow, it show a stars background at first (accumulating without saturation so up to noise), there is wide vertical bars showing up on the sides of the screen as well.

After Twigs i wanted to do two things :

ditch LZMA / stub but still keep doing C
do something in 256 bytes with an algorithm similar to Minsky circle algorithm

This was a bit of a struggle if i recall, going 256 bytes in C required to have more controls onto things such as the executable header.

I knew of this article about tiny ELF executable which show how to reduce the executable header to the smallest one possible so i basically wanted to go with a custom header and i stumbled upon this article about small Linux binary in Rust after some search, the article show how to combine raw GCC generated code and a custom header with some commands, i remember having big troubles with some shell script commands which was solved later on.

The second issue was to do something interesting in C, i wanted to shrink some of my Minsky circle sketches, ported some sketches but didn't make it to 256b in time for the party so i just settled on this one, the program code without headers is ~80 bytes.

The crippling issue on this one was that it was 64 bits on release (so 2x more code density than 32 bits) because i was improving my C framework and didn't have working 32 bits headers yet, this probably limited the result a lot.

Here is some screenshots of related programs that didn't make it, perhaps the first one would have been a better candidate :