Written in 3 days! (22 bytes left after cleaning up for people)
DOSBOX (COM version)
dosbox asmle.com
DOSBOX (Boot sector version)
dosbox -c "mount C: ." -c "C:" -c "boot asmle.img"
QEMU (boot sector version)
"qemu-system-x86_64.exe" -drive format=raw,file=asmle.img
The easiest way to compress something is to make it use less bits. We could make each letter a 4 bit index into a charset, cutting the size in half, a word is 2.5 bytes now. But wait, let's not forget we are doing real computing here. Here's our today's guest: padding! Padding turns our sweet 2.5 bytes into 3 bytes, what a rude guy. But don't worry, we gotta make use of extra 0.5 bytes (4 bits) later.
We need a lookup table for characters. Let's introduce "charset" - a set of 16 characters.
We'll have 2 such charsets to make the game more varied and gain more points for added complexity. This is where extra 4 bits go, they become charset index, it takes values from 0 to 1. Padding will help us save space on decompression routine by making it possible to extract all of the values in a sequence. The formula for getting the decompressed character becomes charset*16 + char.
Here's the resulting word format
cs ch0 ch1 ch2 ch3 ch4
| | | | | |
v v v v v v
0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
makedict.py generates a dictionary by first generating a charset: by picking up 16 random characters from English alphabet and then it takes 32 words that match that set. We do it twice to get 2 dictionaries.
Then the script writes charsets and the words into a binary file which is then included into the game executable itself.
Vocabulary format
charset1 (16 bytes)
charset2 (16 bytes)
64 words (3 bytes each)
See main.asm:148