Quick Introduction to 4k Intros under Windows

A reaction to "Tendencies Related to Operating Systems - A reaction"

SunmaN//PFC

Do you remember the article in Hugi#12 called "Tendencies Related to Operating Systems - A reaction"?

That text sported phrases like "Btw, imagine a 4ktro for Win32, har har." Now there IS a 4ktro for Win32 and it is quite good, if rather short. I wrote it after an argument I had with a C-programmer regarding the use of DirectX in Asm. "You can't work with DirectX in Asm because there are COM-objects" - he screamed. ;-) And I wrote this intro. Great thanks to T$ for his DirectX tutorials in Hugi 18 and his sources - parts of them were used in the intro, although I optimised them for size.

So, it IS possible to write 4kb intros for Win32, but there are some difficulties:

1) DirectX initialisation takes very much space - about 1kb
2) Win32 msg processing and API calls take some space too
3) We have to program all gfx-effects in 32-bit flat mode, so gfx-code is rather big
4) There are some problems with Win32-exe 4kb size, in Win'9* the intro works, but I heard that Windows NT and Win'2000 don't like exe-s smaller than 8 kb.

On the other hand, there are some positive points:

1) Lots of memory
2) You can easily set the SVGA videomode and you don't need to work with video banks on any videocard - we just write the image on the offscreen surface and then make DirectX copy it to the videobuffer.

Disclaimer: If someone knows all that, don't smack me, maybe there are hundreds of 4k intros for Win and I just didn't spot any of them :-) Well, Adok told me that there have already been a few Win-based 4k intros before. So I looked for them and found an intro called Anatyda by Gekko/Astral from Mekka'99. The party version is a .com file, which has a Win-exe inside. At the start that .com unpacks the Win-exe onto the harddisk and executes it. The good thing is that such a .com file packs far better than a Win-exe because of differences between the file formats. For example, a Win-exe has to be aligned and consequently has much empty space inside. But I think that this method is not really valid if you want to call this a Win 4kb intro, because it is saved in DOS-format and unpacks in Win-exe when run.

My intro can be found at www.pdx2k.org or ftp.scene.org/pub/parties/2000/paradox. The sourcecode is also included in the bonus archive to this Hugi issue. I hope that some of you find it helpful. The sources are partially based on sources from the Win32 asm tutorial by T$.

PS: Maybe the next step will be a 512b intro for Win32? ;-)

SunmaN//PFC