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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone been able to download it?

The download keeps failing, and the file is already 165kb (zipped) partially downloaded.

So is this truly 8kb?

On Chrome, the download works better when I right-click and select "Save link as". Chrome mentions that it's not secure because it's http. I've just uploaded the file here, maybe it will work better: https://ctrl-alt-test.fr/dl/The_Sheep_and_the_Flower.zip

If you open the zip file, you'll see multiple files. The biggest (200kB) is a screenshot for reference. It's not used, you can delete it. We didn't include a resolution selector in the executable file; instead we provided one binary for each resolution (e.g. The_sheep_and_the_flower-1920x1080.exe).

It’s a kind of ironic beauty to minify this project all the way down to 8kb for example by developing a minifying source-to-source compiler, and then using a parameter-by-copied-executable scheme for the screen resolution.

I was curious of that too. Technically it should be possible to read the executable file name (via `GetModuleFileName`, because you don't necessarily have `argv`) and pick the resolution accordingly. But that would take at least 30 more bytes in my wild guess...

For the justification: it's the standard approach when doing 4kB intros, we just copied it. At the end, we had ~30 spare bytes, so we could have looked for an alternative.

To be clear: I'm completely okay with that! Early 64K demos didn't have that either anyway.

Yes I downloaded the ZIP, here I put it on my website: https://www.zorinaq.com/pub/The_Sheep_and_the_Flower.zip (SHA256: 91327f463ff5edaae89e1e6fd386f313c33d1f171c84f9e843e263af3d034321) After extracting it contains these files (the zip archive is large because it contains a ~200 kB JPEG screenshot):

  8159 bytes: The_sheep_and_the_flower-1280x720.exe
  8143 bytes: The_sheep_and_the_flower-1920x1080.exe
  8159 bytes: The_sheep_and_the_flower-3840x2160.exe
  8157 bytes: The_sheep_and_the_flower-640x360.exe
  206507 bytes: The_sheep_and_the_flower.jpg
  1014 bytes: The_sheep_and_the_flower.nfo

Yes. The zip is bigger than 8kb because it includes a screenshot and builds for various screen resolutions.

Try the scene.org download link here https://demozoo.org/productions/322612/

The link is simply malformed a bit (http instead of https), it's available (from the original site) here: https://aduprat.com/pub/The_Sheep_and_the_Flower.zip

It's truly 8kb, the zip contains several versions for different resolutions and a relatively large screenshot.

I downloaded it just fine using Firefox. However, when I unzipped it, and then opened the resulting folder, there were no .exe files inside. A moment later, Norton reassured me that it had automatically deleted the malicious .exe files, and I was safe.

So I disabled Norton, and unzipped the file again. This time there were four .exe files, each 8kb in size, for running the movie in various resolutions.

I double-clicked one of them. It immediately reduced the resolution of my displays, and moved/rearranged all of my open windows, putting them all onto the right-hand display. I heard music, but saw no video, and panicked and hit Alt-F4 to stop it. My display resolutions were restored, but I had to manually put all my windows back where they belonged.

Perhaps I should have trusted Norton.

Changing the resolution is expected; there's one executable file for each supported resolution. The program doesn't move or rearrange any other window, but Windows might do it when switching resolution.

I don't know why the graphics didn't start. Maybe the shader compilation failed, or some other issue with the drivers (or the GPU is too old).

The source code is provided, so anyone can check the source and rebuild the binary file. The executable has been tested on multiple machines (and was presented at a demoparty, so it had to run on the compo machine).

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