Code Like It's 198x

fr-08: .the .product

farbrausch's 64K intro that stored no pictures

DemosSource-checked

A 64K intro for Windows by the German group farbrausch, winner of the PC 64K intro competition at The Party 2000 in Denmark. Its party version was exactly 65,536 bytes. Every texture and model is generated when it starts, and the music comes from a software synthesiser that cannot play samples.

Start fr-08: .the .product and the first thing you see is a progress bar, with music already playing. The intro is building its world. Every texture and every model is made from scratch by the program, because the file has nowhere to keep them: the version shown at The Party 2000 in Denmark was 65,536 bytes, exactly 64 kilobytes. “None of the textures is premade and then compressed,” its coder Chaos wrote the following summer. “The original fr-08 code is not capable of storing image data (except the windows-icon).” It won the PC 64K intro competition for its makers, farbrausch, a German group not yet a year old.

Fast facts

  • Group: farbrausch.
  • Released: 28 December 2000, at The Party 2000 in Aars, Denmark.
  • Competition: first in the PC 64K intro competition.
  • Platform: Windows PC with DirectX; the readme asked for at least a Pentium II 350 and a TNT2 graphics card, recommended a GeForce and 128 MB of RAM.
  • Size: 65,536 bytes (party version); 65,024 bytes (final version 1.01).
  • Credits: Chaos (demo and tool code), fiver2 (concept, graphics, 3D, design and choreography), kb (audio code and music), Doj (additional tool code), Yoda (additional demo code), ryg (“compression technology supervisor”).

Recipes, not pictures

A 64K intro has to fit its code, graphics and music into 64 kilobytes. The readme credits Chaos with “main demo and tool code, making it all possible”: he wrote a tool in which fiver2 made the graphics, and the intro stores what fiver2 did in that tool, not the images that came out of it. When it runs, it repeats the steps. “All the textures are generated, even those that look like photoshop,” Chaos wrote.

That is what the progress bar is for. “All the precalculating is needed for generating the textures and models,” Chaos explained. The group had feared it would take 30 to 60 seconds; on most PCs by mid-2001 it took less than ten. The music plays over the wait on purpose, “to show that kb’s synthesiser does not need any precalculation (actually it is incapable of playing samples of any kind)”. Every sound is synthesised as the intro plays.

Getting the whole thing into 64K took an executable compressor as well. The final version’s file header credits “rygs and torus’ exe packer”.

Party version and final version

The party version was, in kb’s words in its readme, untested on anything but Nvidia graphics cards, and promised a final version “somewhen” if the group found major flaws. Version 1.01 followed at the end of January 2001. “We wanted to test this on as much configurations as possible,” the new readme said, “plus, we had to make space for the bugfixes, the icons, and of course the hidden part while still being <64kb.” It came in at 65,024 bytes.

What came next

The tool behind fr-08 was the first of a line. ryg’s account of the group’s tools mentions “the original fr-08 Generator” and Werkkzeug1, followed by GenThree and Werkkzeug3. Werkkzeug3 made the group’s 96K first-person shooter .kkrieger in 2004 and the Breakpoint-winning demo fr-041: debris. in 2007. The group’s 2012 source release covers its tools from 2001 onwards; the fr-08 Generator itself is not among them. See farbrausch for the full story.

Sources

See also

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