The demo scene has been cranking out tiny games for decades, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with more modern platforms where space is at a premium. Take Twitter and its (now) 240-character limit — turns out you can not only cram a game in there, but a bootable CD image for it as well.
Square security engineer Alok Menghrajani, who previously managed to squeeze a game on a bootable floppy into a tweet, has one-upped himself by encasing a Tron-esque lightcycle game inside a CD image.
He then tweeted a snippet of Perl code that, when run, will generate a file of this image. If you burn this image to a CD (or mount it via a virtual machine) and load it, you’ll be able to play the game pictured above.
perl -E ‘say”A”x46422,”BDRDAwMQFFTCBUT1JJVE8gU1BFQ0lGSUNBVElPTg”,”A”x54,”Ew”,”A”x2634,”/0NEMDAxAQ”,”A”x2721,”BAAAAYQ”,”A”x30,”SVVVqogAAAAAAAEAF”,”A”x2676,”LMBaACgB76gfbgTAM0Qv8D4uYAI86qqgcc+AXP45GA8SHIRPFB3DTeYSEhyBSwCa8CwicMB3rSGtkDNFSYwJHvc68MA”,”VapVqlWq”x330’|base64 -D>cd.iso
— alokmenghrajani (@alokmenghrajani) June 15, 2018
While Perl is included in any Linux distribution worth its salt, as well as macOS, Windows users will have to download and install it to make use of the tweet.
If you’re interested, Menghrajani has a more in-depth explanation on his blog, which shows the exact steps he went through to produce the final Perl code.
Bootable CD + retro game in a tweet [Alok Menghrajani, via Motherboard]
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