A whole boss fight in 256 bytes (hellmood.111mb.de)

by HellMood 52 comments 130 points
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52 comments

[−] lucb1e 38d ago
That domain is such a blast from the past for me. I spent so many hours working on projects with free webhosting as a teen!

dang/HN: this domain should probably be added to the list where the subdomain is shown next to the title, since subdomains are users' webspaces. (Might be a good candidate for the public suffix list: "[DNS labels] under which Internet users can (or historically could) directly register names".)

[−] philxor 38d ago
And it came in 5th place in the competition. The winner was this one which is 16 bytes...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKLhH_ANwIc

[−] HellMood 37d ago
The demoscene has a curated collection of "best 16 bytes ever" https://nanogems.demozoo.org/#16_byte_intros As well as 32,64 and so on ... It even goes down to 8(!) Byte productions
[−] flopsamjetsam 38d ago
I clicked on this fearing it was a "256 bytes of JS" (plus X GB of browser), and was pleasantly surprised it was actually 256 bytes.
[−] HellMood 40d ago
Technical write up for "Endbot" 256 bytes MSDOS program with plot, sync, sound, and payoff. Released April 4th at Revision Demoparty 2026.
[−] s3anw3 38d ago
This takes me back to the NES era, where developers squeezed entire worlds into a few kilobytes of ROM. What blows my mind here is that even the NES had ~40KB of program space — and this entire boss fight, complete with sprite animation, scrolling landscape, and MIDI music, fits in 256 bytes. The NES ROM header alone is 16 bytes. Incredible work.
[−] parkertomatoes 38d ago
Audio doesn't work, but here's an emulator link

https://parkertomatoes.github.io/v86/?type=com&content=aACgB...

[−] ale42 38d ago
Didn't run it (yet) but it looks nice. Great that some people are still able to optimize code! I'm wondering if this would run on actual hardware (VGA + a sound card supporting MPU401 emulation)
[−] gavinray 37d ago
My favorite SNES game (Uncharted Waters 2) is a 2MB ROM.

I think about that every time I send a screenshot. The depth, complexity, and audiovisual beauty of that game stuffed into a space roughly a few times larger than a capture of my 1440p monitor in 2026.

[−] HellMood 37d ago
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105909

The "silent" version is only 219 bytes

A new version that adds new features into

the remaining bytes is in the works

[−] rob74 37d ago
Hate to be that guy, but I just can't help it: this is an impressive demo, but for me a "boss fight" is something interactive, which this program obviously isn't. That's probably the reason why the title of the article is (now?) simply "Endbot", while the name of the HTML file is (still?) "A_whole_boss_fight_in_256_bytes.html".
[−] JoshBlythe 37d ago
What a throwback! Reminds me of older gameboy games! Really nice project!
[−] vermilingua 37d ago
[−] Anmol-Baranwal 38d ago
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