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Comment by ceronman | Hacker News Reader

> The result is a ~300 KiB statically linked executable, that requires no libraries, and uses a constant ~1 MiB of resident heap memory (allocated at the start, to hold the assets). That’s roughly a thousand times smaller in size than Microsoft’s. And it only is a few hundred lines of code.

And even with this impressive reduction in resource usage, it's actually huge for 1987! A PC of that age probably had 1 or 2 MB of RAM. The Super NES from 1990 only had 128Kb of RAM. Super Mario Word is only 512KB.

A PlayStation from 1994 had only 2MB of system RAM. And you had games like Metal Gear Solid or Silent Hill.

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A PC in 1987 was more likely to have max 640kb of RAM, the "AT compatibles" (286 or better) were expensive still. We had an XT clone (by the company that later rebranded at Acer) bought in 1987 with 512kb RAM.

Yes. I wrote a version of Minesweeper for the Amstrad CPC, a home computer popular in 1987 (though I wrote it a few years later). I think it was about 5-10Kb in size, not 300. The CPC only had 64k of memory anyway, though a 128k model was available.

7yo me could not understand how people could possibly make software but I knew I wanted to be part of it. I loved my CPC 6128.

Probably a little later but I had an Amstrad 8086 as a teen. I think it was the first computer I bought with my own money.

Even the Windows 95 Minesweeper was only a 24 kilobyte program.

As long as you did not count the large libraries it was calling into.

16kb of the 64kb was reserved for the screen buffer if i remember correctly.

In 1987, I think you'd be very lucky to have that much RAM. 4MB and higher only started becoming standard as people ran Windows more - so Win 3.1 and beyond, and that was only released in 1992.

4 MB was considered a large amount of memory until the release of Windows 95. There were people who had that much, but it tended to be the domain of the workplace or people who ran higher end applications.

If I recall correctly, home computers tended to ship with between 4 MB and 8 MB of RAM just before the release of Windows 95. There were also plenty of people scrambling to upgrade their old PCs to meet the requirements of the new operating system, which was a minimum of 4 MB RAM.

It was over $100/MB for RAM in 1987. The price was declining until about 1990, then froze at about $40/MB for many years do to cartel-like behavior, then plummeted when competition increased around 1995. I was there when the price of RAM dropped 90% in a single year.

Like others have said, that would only be available on what would be a very costly machine for '87.

I distinctly remember the 386sx-16 I got late 1989 came with 1 megabyte and a 40mb hard drive for just under $4k from Price Club (now Costco), which was an unusually good price for something like that at the time.

By comparison, the original from https://minesweepergame.com/download/windows-31-minesweeper.... is 28kb. Might be interesting it disassemble, surely somebody's done that?

A lot of the work being done here by the program code was done in dynamically linked libraries in the original game.

A PC in 1987 didn't run X11 either though.

You needed something way more expensive to run X11 before 1990.

Yes and no.

Since we are talking about software written today, not just software available in 1987, X386 (which came out with X11R5 in 1991) was more than capable of running on a 386-class machine from 1987. Granted, a 386 class machine with 1MB of ram and a hard-disk would have been pushing $10k in 1987 (~$27k in 2024 dollars), so it wasn't a cheap machine.

Desqview/X ran on a 386 I think.

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/desqviewx-the-forgotten-mid-1...

I wonder how big the binary would be on a 1987 Amiga 500 would be then

Also PlayStation was notiorious in game development, by being the first games console with a C SDK, until then it was only Assembly.

When arcade games started to be written in C, it was still using mainframe and micros, with downlink cables to the development boards.

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