How the Commodore 64 demo “A Mind is Born” generates an excellent music video, using only 256 bytes of code?

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# [Link to Video of Demo](https://youtu.be/sWblpsLZ-O8)

No, I don’t mean megabytes. The entire program is 256 **bytes**. That’s significantly less than 0.0000003 gigabytes, to generate both the video and the audio. Call of Duty: Warzone, before they optimized the install size, was about **1 billion times** the install size of A Mind is Born. This seems completely impossible to me.

There’s an explanation of the code in the video description, but it’s the *opposite* of ELI5. I was hoping someone here could write up something a bit more accessible.

In: Technology

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because that program is just establishing an algorithm to generate patterns.

The base COD game engine is only a small part of the overall game file size. The bulk of the game file is made up of texture images used to provide the detailed graphics. The more detailed and realistic looking the surfaces are, the higher resolution (and therefore larger file size) the images used to cover the model frames are. The game isn’t generating the maps and images progressively, so it has to already contain all the maps, character models, items, and the corresponding images to place on them.

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