maybe if the Asphyxia tutorials hadn't been written for Turbo Pascal (+inline asm) and the C-compilers (back in '97) were really that good at optimizing as comments here suggest, I'd have gone a different route. but still, that's just performance. I doubt a compiler can beat a human at size optimization, cramming as much audio-visual power into as little bytes as possible--although executable-packers have come a loooong loong way since then (and impressively, afaik mostly by research and not so much Moore's law).