Little Coding Competiton!

[Teddy Rogers]

I thought it may be interesting to have a simple but interesting coding competition. There are no prizes for winning, just simple satisfaction

The challenge is to make the smallest, "Hello World!", executable file. That means you can use the smallest and tightest code possible, merge sections, create a very small DOS stub, etc. What ever it takes! The only rules are:

* It cannot be packed (this will only make the file bigger anyway)

* It must contain the text, "Hello World!"

* It must open with a message box

I've attached a simple starter to give you an idea. Everyone should be able to beat it just by compiling code in assembler. Good luck...

Ted.

Hello.zip

[Whiterat]

I decided to use FASM for a change, I usually use NASM.

Here is my EXE and the src.

EDIT:

Got it down to: 1,173 bytes

Im gonna strip a bit more out of the header and get it down some more.

Smallest_Ever___Src.rar

Edited April 10, 2006 by mxwr

[human]

such compo already was, if i remember in hugi mag and best score was 30 bytes or less, but wasnt compatible with 9x,you can strip header etc to achive it, but only working on exe, not asm src

[diablo2oo2]

yes i agree to human..

i remember too there already was such a competition.

[human]

mxwr:

.code

text db "Hello World!"

start:

invoke MessageBox,0,o text,o text,0

ret

end start

will be smaller:P

if you wanna you can run only on xp and do direct jump to messagebox so all rdata section is gone

but this is hardcore and not compatible with all

[Whiterat]

Can someone find the true current score so we can have a target to aim at?

Edit:

I am down to 677, my friend is down to 228.

This guy who supposedly did 30, it must have been a DOS exe.

No way can you get down to that with a Win32 app.

Edited April 10, 2006 by mxwr

[Teddy Rogers]

I wasn't aware it had been done before. Just talking to a friend on IRC the other day and we got talking about how to make executables really small. Thought it would be interesting to see the results here.

30 bytes! It must have only been a header! Human, you have the file?

Ted.

[Napalm]

Thanks mxwr for the intro. Here's my entry: helloworld.zip

Contents Explained:

HelloWorld16 - 16Bit MS-DOS - 22 Bytes

HelloWorld32c - 32Bit Console - 244 Bytes

HelloWorld32i - 32Bit Win32 w/ Import Table - 432 Bytes

HelloWorld32w1 - 32Bit Win32 - XPSP2 Only! - 254 Bytes

HelloWorld32w2 - 32Bit Win32 w/ MessageBox Title - XPSP2 Only! - 215 Bytes

ohh, what do I win a chocolate egg for easter?

Learn and Enjoy!

Napalm

Edited April 15, 2006 by Napalm

[Guest Bovski]

an exe to do such a simple job why not try vbs you can do it in 20 bytes

msgbox "Hello World"

[Guest anthracene]

This reminds me of some assembly coding contest ( Assembly/Assembler '99 was it called I believe - not sure ). They had ASTOUNDING graphics that you could even run in 1600*1400 and it looked awesome. There were 'videos' coded in assembler that were like 5 minutes long and only 100kb or so.

I'll see if I can find a link for one of them, might be interesting to see, even though it has nothing to do with this topic.

[anorganix]

The Prophecy - Project Nemesis (by cns!phcy)

				 _____________	___
  _____ ________\\_		   \_ /  //______
 _)  _//	 /	/			/ \__	   /
 \_  \	  /	/			/	/	 _/
_ /_________\___/_____________\__________\ _
\/ - -diP---------------------------bM- - \/
		 C  O  N  S  P  I  R  A C  Y				  presents
		   T H E   P R O P H E C Y			   Project Nemesis
			(fixed party version)
				a 64k intro					for			   ASSEMBLY 2004
	_								  _
- -\//--------------------------------\\/- -

[b]http://rapidshare.de/files/30365580/cns_phcy.rar

Amazing IMHO! Enjoy!

[Guest anthracene]

Aye, that was one of my favourites - there even is a so-called 4kb contest and some of those programs can bring some high-end computers absolutely down on their knees.

Google for assembly 99 - should be the 2nd site listed. All the files of about 10 contests are stored there.

[Guest Bovski]

anthracene you may want to checkout http://www.scene.org

[Guest anthracene]

I know, I believe the site I was trying to tell you about ( not quite sure what the deal is with the external links rule so I had to do it that way ), links to that site when downloading some of the files

[Ufo-Pu55y]

Yeah, the Demo-Scene is simply unbelievable...

Even saw a documentation on TV tonight about ?em -

about a famous contest for them I think...

don?t remember its name.

It was said that demo-coders are the elite in

coding (and will be in the future).

No doubt...

/EDIT:

Ahh.. it was called "Evoke 2006".

For example the winner of the 4KIntro-Contest:

[u]http://www.scene.org/file_dl.php?url=ftp://ftp.de.scene.org/pub/parties/2006/evoke06/in4k/titan-inferno4k.zip&id=313018

3,97 KB ! OMGWTF...

Edited August 22, 2006 by Ufo-Pu55y

[Guest anthracene]

Here is my first attempt.

"File HelloWorld.rar (0 KB) uploaded!" - lol.

887 kb. Tried tweaking it abit by messing with the header ( stuffing the code inside it ) - but had problems changing some members without crashing. Could get smaller if I figured out how to use the masm's align option correctly... Should work on any system.

/>http://rapidshare.de/files/30498120/HelloWorld.rar.html

[Teddy Rogers]

Good going and best result so far...

Ted.