What is the Smallest Possible .EXE?

"I’m not sure typing simulator would become a best seller on Steam." You'd be surprised what's taking over Steam tops these days...

@darkarchon

Just to be pedantic, the first file isn't actually 0 bytes. But its contents are!

@araghon007

When I started watching, I somehow only expected the usual "overlapping the DOS and PE headers" and hello world message box, didn't expect you to enter the <1k demoscene

@qwerty11111122

17:46 bad video for security. Now the number of executables is finite and we can brute force through all of the 2^2^34 executables to find all of the penetration vectors.

@thomquiri9860

1:15 nice integer overflow lmao

@JJFX-

Fun fact: That "MZ" required at the beginning of the header stands for Mark Zbikowski, who is credited with creating the .exe file format at Microsoft.

@AlexTrusk91

I once talked to the kernel directly. Now I got a lifetime supply of chicken wings.

@SomethingCatchy2_

I was exspecting this to just be a deep dive in to how small an exe can be, then he just made a game, this is amazing

@technikschaf1574

The smallest piano having 555 Bytes, "like" THE one IC used for making simple sounds, the one and only NE555... That's just awesome and it cant be a coincidence

The shortest DOS .EXE file with a well-formed header (i.e. NOT a renamed .COM file) which gracefully returns control to DOS is 26 bytes long. It takes advantage of the fact that the header length value in the header itself can be set to 16 bytes (despite a conformant EXE header having to contain at least 26 bytes of valid information), which will start the execution of code from offset 10h, where the initial value of SP (stack pointer) is normally located. Setting this value to the two bytes corresponding to an INT 20h instruction (CDh 20h) will instantly terminate the program and return to DOS. In fact, some DOS emulators, such as older DOSBox versions, cannot handle these unusually short headers and will hang instead.

@EscapedShadows

11:58 „And that works twice as well as I expected“ Best line every

@powerpc6037

I remember having an exe file on my Amiga which was only 56 bytes in size: "reboot". This in fact rebooted the Amiga computer when you executed it.

@pielover267

5:17 wait a sec, wait a sec, does every windows executable really contain ASCII art of a shrub by default? I'm tempted to assume that was a joke so you would have something to rhyme, but honestly I'm hoping that it's true because that would be a hilarious and genuinely beautiful absurdity.

@DavesGarage

Great video! I never considered what the largest would be! Now I know :-)

@blarghblargh

Back in the day, we called it "Anne See" (like "antsy" with a silent "t"). not "Ay En Ess Eye"

@KvapuJanjalia

If I remember correctly, if you disable ASLR, you can simply jump to Win32 API function addresses. This will eliminate some strings in IMPORTS section of a PE file. I haven't tried it myself.

@filker0

Fun video. ANSI (usually spoken as "ahn-see") control sequence originated with the Digital Equipment Corporation VT100. The SGR (Set Graphic Rendition) sequence was extended in "ANSI.SYS" on DOS to allow setting foreground and background colors. The glyphs the video shows beyond the ASCII characters are the VT100 graphics set, so the same program game would work using a serial port connected to a VT100+ terminal emulator that supported the color extension. The flickering could be reduced by only redrawing the bottom row except as the meteors shift down. Using save cursor and restore cursor sequences could improve keeping the little house's position from flickering. This will take more code code, of course.

@Dr-Zed

Demoscene members being chads as always. Crinkler is one of my favorite tools, so cursed yet so elegant.

@mrjson3039

Dude... Dealing with microsoft's documentation practoces, that's the challenge I saw. Amazing work of art

@OlegDorbitt

14:04 big thumbs up for CISC, without it we wouldn't have such gems as "AAA" and "PUNPCKHQDQ"

@Felice_Enellen

One thing about compressors like crinkler is that you'll always have the potential hazard of the output executable being detected as possible malware. Most AV is leery of anything that looks like it's compressed, since it's a common way to hide telling features of the executable.

@shallex5744

10:56 those aren't actually ASCII characters (except for the @) ASCII is only a 7-bit encoding, and thus only contains 127 characters. anything beyond that into the 8-bit realm is a vendor-specific extension beyond ASCII

@MangoPango1973

Nearly 40 years ago, my first Computer was an Amstrad / Schneider CPC 464. I bought a monthly magazine which featured type in programs, back then called listings and there was always the 1kb program section, containing fantastic tools and full games with sound, colour graphics and joystick controls. I remember several Space Invaders clones, Shoot'em Ups, Racing and Puzzle games and an absolutely awesome Fractal generator, everything less than 1kb in Locomotive Basic and less than one page in the magazine.

@etaoinwu

that 嗯 got me laughing so hard in the binary selection part

@thewelder3538

Just as a comment here, you don't want to do things like cmp al, 0. The reason is simple. You're comparing an immediate value and that value has to be stored in the instruction. Since you're only interested in the flags, you should test al, al whereby the assembly doesn't need to store the immediate value and it will set the flags for you to branch against.

@denverreid1875

11 days ago

"It's not cheating because I make up the rules here" The US government would like to know your location

@andrew_ray

With the parameters now all in place, we can build Jorge Luis Borges' library of Babel, but for exe files. Since there's a limit to the number of bytes that can go in an exe and a finite number of values each byte can have, we can imagine a filesystem the contains every possible exe file. But it couldn't be a Windows filesystem.

@nomenmasi8964

I just wonder why you used the song "There is no new China if there is no Chinese Communist Party" as the BGM for the (allegedly) Microsoft footage ♪mayor gone cheddar though mayor syndrome gore ♪mayor gone cheddar though mayor syndrome gore ♪gone cheddar, ...

@paumb5355

11:59 I laughed more than i should have on this part lol. Amazing video

@Dan-ib4yc

12 days ago

Getting into low-level programming is like trying to get what's going on in a soap opera that began 3 decades before you were born

@KLegyyn

You brought me back in time to my computer science days, making games on console applications. . Those were the simplest of days. . Thank God I still have them. . .

@diegoreckholder945

it's been about 10 years since I last wrote any code, and about 12 years since I worked with processor instructions. This video made me remember that I loved this before my professors at college made me hate this with my soul

@moontoadz

ANSI you can just say "an-see"

@HedgehogGolf

0:26 sneaking in your mailing list is a genius move lol

@suspense_comix3237

15:09 I braced myself for a Rickroll, but was glad that that wasn't the case.

@sundhaug92

I mean, you can make a smaller executable for Windows by taking advantage of the NTVDM and making a COM-file

@TheSektorz

I've played DOS games with entire open worlds that were less than 64 kilobytes

@PaulPassarelli