[HN Gopher] MARS.EXE - COM (2021)
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MARS.EXE - COM (2021)
Author : reconnecting
Score : 140 points
Date : 2025-07-12 12:43 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (chaos.if.uj.edu.pl)
(TXT) w3m dump (chaos.if.uj.edu.pl)
| reconnecting wrote:
| I remember when I saw MARS.EXE for the first time on my 386. That
| was something absolutely unimaginable for real-time graphics.
| Pure magic!
|
| It's fascinating to see that 30 years later someone is still
| working around its source code.
| dvh wrote:
| Have you also tried to reach the end?
| reconnecting wrote:
| Of course, that was the first intention, to get to the end.
|
| I remember as a child, I had spent a lot of time on this, but
| perhaps the direction was wrong. (-:
| richardfey wrote:
| It's endless right?
| reconnecting wrote:
| Sure, it was endless.
|
| Here is "making of" from author.
|
| https://www.pouet.net/prod_nfo.php?which=4662
| rwmj wrote:
| I remember when the demo came out (I didn't even know it was
| called a "demo" at the time). We gathered around it running on
| one of the lab PCs. It was quite unbelievable that something
| like it could be done in such a tiny executable.
| reconnecting wrote:
| Yeah, I had exact the same fellings.
| feiss wrote:
| same feeling
| baal80spam wrote:
| Beautiful.
|
| For comparison: In Windows 11, Notepad's size, referring to the
| disk space it occupies, is approximately 25.1 MB according to the
| Microsoft Store.
| reconnecting wrote:
| For comparison, the size of this HTML page + CSS is larger than
| MARS.EXE was.
| dcrazy wrote:
| That seems inevitable, given the webpage contains an assembly
| listing of MARS.EXE. Mnemonics are larger than machine code.
| reconnecting wrote:
| I meant the source of this page, including the transparent
| pixel image and the logo.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| How did it get that big? On my Windows 10, notepad.exe is 196
| kB, I remembered it being under 100 kB, but it did get a few
| more features in the last years. Anyways, hard to judge
| considering that a good part of the original Notepad is likely
| to be standard Win32 components.
|
| Anyways, none of these "mainsteam" apps hold a candle to
| sizecoding productions. Just look like what comes out of
| Lovebyte, a demoparty where no production is above 1 kB.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| I think they moved it to .net, made it a store app, dark mode
| and copilot ai.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Win11 notepad has multiple tabs and previous session saving,
| which is nice. But it also has a bunch of other crap such as
| copilot integration and it's logged into your Microsoft
| account.
| accrual wrote:
| Microsoft recently added both Copilot integration and rich
| text formatting (!) options to stock Win11 Notepad.
| Fortunately, they can be turned off for now.
|
| I do like that the rich text support allows converting
| to/from Markdown, but I still prefer plaintext mode.
| reconnecting wrote:
| I thought copilot integration was sarcasm.
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enhance-your-
| wri...
| reconnecting wrote:
| Until now, I thought the underlined-bold-red text in
| official announcements was the worst thing Microsoft
| bring into humans culture, but it seems there's something
| even bigger coming.
| consumer451 wrote:
| It's insidious. Mercedes Benz is doing Copilot
| integration!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44583520
| GuB-42 wrote:
| So Notepad quickly went from decades of not having the most
| basic features, like support for UNIX like endings and
| files larger than a few kBs, to a 25 MB monstrosity...
|
| As if they tried to avoid the sweet spot the best they
| could.
| x______________ wrote:
| For anyone interested and I don't see this advice posted
| anywhere enough, you can uninstall the bloated Win11
| notepad version from settings -> apps and Notepad will
| revert back to the plain text version we all know and love
| (which now stands at 352kb).
| Koffiepoeder wrote:
| One of the lucky 10000 on this one I guess. Thanks!
| rkagerer wrote:
| WTF? On Windows 7 it was 189 KB
| skrebbel wrote:
| The explanation is a great read. It reminds me of Unc's amazing
| explanation of how they did "cdak", possibly one of the best 4k
| demos ever made:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150112121832/https://www.pouet...
|
| (for completeness, cdak pouet/download page:
| https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=55758 - youtube capture:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCh3Q08HMfs)
| 112233 wrote:
| yay, another person with a bookmark to webarchive copy of that
| thread. dune's (Lassi Nikko) post about the making of the music
| for cdak was equally metal, if a bit too short.
| skrebbel wrote:
| yeah so sad that the real page's images linkrotted. Hooray
| for archive.org!
| a1o wrote:
| Uhm, my guess is pouet doesn't have a image host for those
| topics so they are linked from external source.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Ive looked for an online dosbox that would let me load the ASM,
| but weirdly found nothing.
| reconnecting wrote:
| Have you tried this one?
|
| https://archive.org/details/demoscene_mars-TimClarke
|
| https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=4662
| tetris11 wrote:
| Oh wow, really nice -- took me a while to realise that
| hitting a key exits the program and that it only responds to
| mouse input
| reconnecting wrote:
| Description from pouet.net and how it works (1)
|
| The Mars demo was written by Elixir's resident graphics guru and
| Head of R & D Tim Clarke in 1993, whilst he was still at school.
| Freely distributed on the Internet, the demo soon gained
| legendary status for its ability to generate fractal terrain and
| render it real time, all with a meagre 5K. As a result Tim was
| headhunted to work for space agency Lunacorp in Washington for
| several summers whilst studying at Cambridge University.
|
| We recommend running this in DOS mode as it was designed to run
| on a 386 and may well crash Windows. Remember that this demo was
| designed for machines that were around in 1993! Use the mouse to
| move around and press any key to quit.
|
| (1) https://www.pouet.net/prod_nfo.php?which=4662
| nopakos wrote:
| One of the first emails I've sent in my life was to Tim Clarke
| asking how Mars did work and I was so happy he answered! I
| remember the graph with the stars.
| reconnecting wrote:
| I didn't have any access to email at this time, and Mars
| looked to me like people somewhere out there were playing
| with real-time generated 3d virtual worlds while I was stuck
| with Windows 3.1 forever and no one would rescue me.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| I remember mouse control - I didn't expect in a dos application
| at the time, and it also felt like a waste of space ( I think
| you had to fiddle with interrupt 33 or something like that to
| deal with the mouse which was more complicated than basic port
| reading )
| amiga386 wrote:
| It's a classic demo. The question is, how does the size-reduced
| version perform on an 80386? (as opposed to a multi-gigahertz
| machine trusting DOSBox to emulate a 386)
| fl0id wrote:
| at the end, it says it was at least tested to compile (and
| presumably run) on real machines.
| phkahler wrote:
| I remember seeing this, reading the high level description of how
| it works, and doing my own implementation in school. Probably in
| Turbo Pascal on a 486.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| MARS.EXE... Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A
| long time.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Reminds me as a kid I spent all my money on a Springer Verlag
| book on Fractals[1] in the 1988s, and attempted to reproduce some
| of the forms on a z80 home computer. Very, Very, slowly.
|
| [1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-3784-6
| flockonus wrote:
| Would love seeing this running on the web via WASM or similar :)
| shmerl wrote:
| I remember poking at it in the binary editor and finding a byte
| that changed the color palette from red base to green and blue.
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(page generated 2025-07-16 23:01 UTC)