carlsson wrote:
To recapitulate, the whole MiniGame compo stems from one of the yearly flamewars between the Usenet groups comp.sys.cbm and comp.sys.sinclair. You know those where supporters of the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum would bash eachother, telling the otherside their shortcomings (C64: brown, blocky graphics - Spectrum: rubber keys, awful sound).
Yeah those idiots never shut up!! ;-)
Someone began to post challenges, one at a time and the programmers in respective team should post their solutions: which computer could perform a task in less code, faster or more elegantly. The challenges grew to game like dimensions, and somebody came up with the idea which computer could produce the best games in 512 bytes. The first year (2001), a total of two categories were open: 512 bytes and 2K. Apart from C64 and Spectrum, a few Atari 800 entries were included. There were no more than ~10 entries in each category, but some quite spectacular ones.
The big boom happened in 2002, when it was decided to only have one category of 1K program size. You choose if you want to write your game in Basic, machine code, compiled Pascal/C whatever, but it should be loadable and runnable on a stock machine. There was some discussion on the TAP and DSK headers, if they should be included in the file size or not. In the end, the decision was that most of them should count to the file size, because on many computers could can store code in the headers. It may seem foreign for novice programmers, but the experienced ones know all the tricks. It may be worth noting that compression is allowed, i.e. if you wrote a 1.5K game but found a way to compress it down to 1K, it is accepted. This is particularly interesting for 4K games, but most of the time you write your game so tightly in machine code that the compression routines can't improve anything.
So in 2002 the 2nd MiniGame Compo was announced wide, and open to practically all 8-bit home computers and video games, with special rules for the video games which have a minimum cartridge size exceeding 1K. The limitation at 8-bit (6502, Z80 etc) was because it still was meant as an extention of the flame war, and while 16-bit computers tend to use more memory, they also have more advanced instruction sets so you can write very complex programs in small code size. I think there is a Tetris clone for 386 in MS-DOS which runs in 256 bytes!!!
In 2003 or 2004, a 4K category was added because a lot of people thought 1K was too limiting. It has fared quite well, but never really got the same recognition as the 1K one. As I've said before, many people including me were expecting to see even more amazing games in 4K than what mostly have happened. Insatiatible, eh?
One year there was a 8K category that received one or none entries. A few years ago there finally was a category for 16-bit: X86, 68K etc. Only one entry for the Neo Geo video game was entered, and it was a rather mediocre looking Bejeweled clone.
So no. Maybe the MiniGame compo has never been open to anyone who like to dabble around, because of the size limitations and an unspoken request that entries should be of as high quality as possible. There were a few crap like games, but nowhere as many as the special crap game compos in which the whole idea is to write a really crappy, malfunctioning game.
I could start a flame with comp.lang.pascal.borland about the purpose of using TP3, though they would simply produce stuff full of Long Integers and restrict their programs to 2k! Likewise I'd invoke rules saying programs submitted would also have to run in CP/M.
I know of one person who have tried to make a Minigame though were unsuccessful and put it on their website instead, there's probably a few people who have tried and being unsuccessful though.
I remember compression being allowed, though found it too complicated to investigate further in conjunction with a TP program - it would have to be a compressed COM file which executes and uncompiles itself as soon as it's loaded, I'm not even sure the library which accompanies the program would be very compressable somehow! :-(