What about creating a Contests forum?
A forum where people can post contests and challenges would be cool!
There are lots of possibilities:
* Crack-me's and solutions
* Coding challenges
* Proof of concept source codes
and so on...
Something like small coding games to have fun and learn more assembly!
what do you think?

i think there woudln't be enough posters....

i like this idea, it would be VERY good for brains =)

vid: I think there would be. Because with such forums people would become motivated to create something.
And creating ideas and solving problems always make your brain work better.
We could have weekly or monthly contest posts.
I already got some cool ideas. I'm going to post several crack-me's, so people can challenge themselves. It will have several levels from begginer to expert. It can be very educational for assembly coding and reading code experience.
Someone could post some coding challenge (games, tiniest space-limited programs, tiniest OS, tiniest graphical effects, etc.).
Do you remember the good days of 100 bytes arkanoid games?
Do you remember those "code this in the tiniest and fasted code you can"?
Or maybe something like "Post a very unknown instruction from Pentium, and give a example of its usage"
We could give some prize for winners, or maybe the prize would be just the fun and knowledge.

Just think about it.

vid probably says that because the last 512 compo was unsuccesful, decard has made a lot of efforts promoting the compo and then practically no one has submited an entry...

Anyway, why not just use the "projects and ideas" forum? I think that a crack-me is a project and sometimes it could be an idea, for example post some protection mechanism and then the crackers will try to defeat it (it differs from crack-me because it's not intended to be cracked )

The others challenges fits as projects, I think.

Well, there were four entries in total, if I remember correctly. And two were mine!

YONG

I think if level of 'contests' is low enough. ppl might even participate, I would, but what I've seen, most of you are way above me in asm so I'm too shamed to show my sloppy code

I think its a good idea, but it would be best to have open challenges, like for example, the smallest "Hello world!" to run from a dos prompt.
If the best was 19bytes, the coders name is top of highest score list, but if in say 3 months someone does it in 18 bytes, they go to top of list.
This no time limit, will help, people who may have little time.

PS: The 512byte compo was very successfully the year before.

okay, so if you dare...

i promised 512 byte paratrooper last year. Unfortunately - it turned out to be about 20 bytes larger, even after every optimization that came in my mind (I didn't try BCD instructions and few others that i keep to myself).

I don't post sources here, by purpose, because sources are not interesting, but disassembling thing like this may be, and it is very educational for beginner/advanced, to fully comprehend this. If anyone can convice me he understood sources enough, he gets sources and my personal explaination of everything there.

I am sad i couldn't strip those circa 25 bytes off, but that would require to remove some functionality, which i hate. Maybe if i am bored sometimes, you will see reduced 512b boot sector paratrooper, without some extra graphics etc.

enjoy and reverse

PS: controlling is with 4 5 6 numeric, check NumLock.

http://student.fiit.stuba.sk/~mocko04/TOSSOFF/512b_done.com

Vid, that 536 byte paratrooper is amazing! I wouldn't believe if I hadn't seen it. Nice work, really.

On my machine (P4 HT, 2.8 GHz, 512 MB RAM) nothing really happens. I see a shot gun and I can move it with 4 and 6 but I can't do anything else.

i it may be problem with RDTSC, even DosBox doesn't want to run it sometimes

PS: It was coded completely without ANY debugging, i couldn't evene output any info to screen very much. My only debugging "signal" was jumping to exit routine if code reaches particular place

Nice work vid, runs fine in MiniDOS , pitty about the code as that would be a great challenge, to see if anyone can get it to 512bytes.

PS: MiniDOS was called Dos4u, its a DOS that will be able to run at least 100 old dos programs, but will be less than 2k, written in fasm of coarse .

dex4u: if i make parachutes disappear instead of stop on ground and reduce helicopter graphic, i save 15 bytes. i also have some maybe 2 bytes in my mind, i believe i will finally make it, unfortunately slightly reduced.

I was just too drunken yesterday when i returned to room, so i uploaded it too soon.

I understand vid, its always those last 30 or so bytes that are the hardest to optimise.
Good luck .

Just keep away from ceilings and fences btw. how's your face healing?

it was okay after week, thanks, but i still don't have my teeth fixed and there is a visible mark under my left eye, you can see place on that photo. First i drinked two days after that funnight...

vid, did you ever squeeze it into 512 bytes? At http://www.256b.com there are several amazing programs (WOLF.ZIP, SMILE256.RAR, GREETZ.ZIP, TET.ZIP), so I feel confident that yours can be shrunk!

Here's a AI pong game, about 178 bytes .
http://dex.7.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=229

i am on 504... only thing that is missing is counting missed parachutes.
but i also have 524 byte version where parachutes remain visible on earth (in short version they disappear) and helicopters are animated (it looks like winch is rotating). Second one looks really good

it is also after massive optimization of everything, everything checked at least 3 times for possible optimizations, many tricks used etc. Maybe there is place to use some bcd arithmetic instructions somewhere, but i don't know how they work and am lazy to study

btw, looking at some of those 256b sources, many could have been easily optimized better