27 comments

  • TuringNYC 2 hours ago

    On a related note -- when I see the minuscule filesize of the original Zelda game on emulators, I marvel at how little text/code/information could produce how much wonder, how far-reaching impact, and how many hours of enchantment for me.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_(video_gam...

    • jsheard an hour ago

      Zelda 1 was 128 kB, for those wondering, and that's without any compression. Double that for the sequel.

  • zamadatix 3 hours ago

    For me:

    - Browser: works after renaming to .html

    - Linux: "./snake.com: line 20: lzma: command not found". Installing the xz package makes it work (already had XWayland enabled so X11 worked, but may be needed if you have a strict Wayland session).

    - Windows: As either .com or renaming to .exe I get "The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000005). Click OK to close the application." Not sure how to make this one work, it's definitely not AV related though (I have that stripped in this sandbox VM).

    Edit: Got it working in all 3 now. On Windows I still had DEP enabled on all programs to test some apps earlier, turning that back off allowed it to launch.

    • w4yai 3 hours ago

      Works for me on Windows 11

      • zamadatix 3 hours ago

        Hmm, Windows 11 25H2 here as well. Redbean works so there must be something about this particular approach combined with some unknown setting on my install.

        Edit: Got it working, was DEP.

    • GlumWoodpecker 3 hours ago

      If I ran it with just

          $ chmod +x snake.com
          $ ./snake.com
      
      ... then it would try to use Mono to launch it:

          Cannot open assembly './snake.com': File does not contain a valid CIL image.
      
      But, running it explicitly with Bash works:

          $ bash snake.com
      
      Pretty nifty but doesn't work out of the box on any Linux, at least :p Running Debian 13.
      • seba_dos1 3 hours ago

        > ... then it would try to use Mono to launch it:

        That's because of the binfmt handler that Mono installs which matches the PE header.

    • deklesen 3 hours ago

      its written in the post

      • zamadatix 3 hours ago

        If you mean lzma it wasn't immediately apparent to me it was a binary requirement, but inspecting the hex dump at the end + the message is how I figured out it was. I wonder how much space you lose dropping lzma and doing some other method as "tail -c+4294 $0|head -c 5061|lzma -dc>/tmp/a;chmod +x /tmp/a;(/tmp/a&rm /tmp/a);exit" would be more universal and the linux portion isn't all that big.

        If you mean the .html rename or whatever my Windows problem was, I must be missing it. Edit: Windows was DEP.

  • netsharc 44 minutes ago

    Semi-related: Windows EXE files are runnable in DOS (at least when DOS was a thing, so for Windows 3.1x or 9x), but most of the time the DOS part just prints "This program requires Microsoft Windows." and exits. An exception is regedit.exe, that one can use to import registry values even in DOS. (Huh, although, how does it do that without using Windows API?)

  • nvllsvm 3 hours ago

    Not cross-platform, but I'm reminded of the kkrieger game for Windows which was a 96k FPS game that looked visually impressive for the time.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20100304155706/http://www.thepro...

  • socketcluster 2 hours ago

    I love the idea of applications which exist in one file which you can run anywhere. I've been working towards this with my serverless platform; you can build complex data-driven apps with just one .html file and mostly declarative HTML markup (thanks to web-components which are loaded from a remote server). With modern browser features, you don't need a bundling system. Once you do away with it; a whole universe is opened up.

    The ability to load .html files over the file:// protocol is a powerful, often neglected feature. In practice, it means you can double-click an HTML file and it runs an app in your browser instantly.

  • trollbridge 3 hours ago

    One of the interesting things about Polyglot is that nobody did it any sooner. It would have been feasible a decade ago or two ago.

    • Retr0id an hour ago

      Now I wonder when the first polyglot file was published. I kinda just assumed they'd been around forever. EICAR.COM comes to mind as a COM/plaintext polyglot

  • ValdikSS 2 hours ago
  • indigodaddy 3 hours ago

    Wonder why they don't give a demo/link to the browser version

    • nxrabl 2 hours ago

      It's the same file, you just rename it to end in '.html'

      • indigodaddy an hour ago

        sure but they have a blog and a webserver that's serving html. just put the .html version there so i dont have to download anything or mess about too much. just want to click and see it

  • bananaboy 3 hours ago

    Very clever!

  • gaigalas 2 hours ago

    Quite cool.

    You could distribute it as `.html` only, and use JS to offer a local download link to itself in the correct extension. A polyglot installer, of sorts.

    For example, this gist is an HTML that, when opened, offers a download zip of its DOM in whatever state it currently is:

    https://gist.github.com/alganet/c904acb57282402fc0bd724f1eeb...

    I think you can use something similar to get the entire page contents as a blob, but I never tested with binary data in actual browsers. Perhaps even patch it to avoid the initial windows error.

  • journal 2 hours ago

    Can't you do that with a language model in less than one paragraph of instructions? Seems like overkill.

    • Underphil 21 minutes ago

      I sincerely hope this type of comment isn't going to become commonplace in the future. Especially when it's someone's hobby project or labour of love.