There’s a dick joke in there somewhere
Today’s trend seems to be leaning towards larger and larger installs, some clocking in at 40+ GB. Developers are concentrating on bigger textures, lossless sound, and zero compression. Even patches can be multiple GB, many of them required on release. There are some though that challenge themselves to do the opposite, to build a game using the least amount of space possible.
For 32 years the smallest chess program was 1k ZX Chess (actually taking up only 672 bytes of memory) for the Sinclair ZX81 programmed by David Horne. The ZX81 came with 1kB of memory, so the game was programmed more by necessity than desire, with the whole program fitting on just two magazine pages. It featured a functional AI to play against and was written in pure Assembly.
This week though, BootChess by Red Sector Inc. took the throne from the Sinclair classic by running in 487 bytes of memory. This game too is written in Assembly which has been optimized to the point where it is highly unlikely even one byte is wasted. It features a functional A.I., ASCII graphics, and is available on Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and BSD.
I know chess isn’t terribly exciting, but the fact that a fully-featured chess game can be written in under 3,000 characters is mind-boggling. I’m fairly sure I couldn’t even describe chess in that small of a space.
Computer chess created in 487 bytes, breaks 32-year-old record [Geek.com]
