MICROCOSM
A 64 KB demo engine and toolkit for x86_64 Linux, written in C11

These pages document MICROCOSM, a small, self-contained demoscene engine. It has procedural geometry, an instanced HDR renderer with a full post stack and a software synth that uses no samples. Its build pipeline compresses the engine, the demo and the soundtrack into one self-extracting ELF of under 64 KB. A complete reference demo, "Hello World", comes with it, and the README at the top of the repository covers building and running it.

Read them in this order:

1. Tutorial: making your own 64k intro with MICROCOSM. It starts with the tiny64.h ten-liner and works up to a demo directory of your own and a size-optimised binary.
2. Toolkit reference: the public mc_ API, module by module, with every public type and function, its defaults and conventions, and short examples.
3. Internals: how each module works and why, the renderer, the frame, and how the picture keeps time with the music.
4. Pipeline: how the demo fits in 64 KB. It covers the build flavours, every flag, the numbers, each tool in tools/ and the video capture.
5. Making of "Hello World": the reference demo taken apart on one page. It covers the story and its timeline, how each scene and the end card are drawn, the soundtrack and how to change it.
6. Publishing on GitHub: the first push, later commits, and releases with the 64k file and the video attached.

These pages are online as HTML at https://fuzztheplanet.github.io/microcosm/. GitHub's own view of the .org files opens a link to a section of another page at the top of that page, and the HTML goes straight to the section. To build the HTML yourself you need Emacs. From the top of the repository:

make -C docs html

Then open docs/index.html. make -C docs clean removes the HTML again. After adding a heading, run make -C docs ids before the next export to give it a CUSTOM_ID, the id that links to it use. The .org files read fine as plain text and in any Org viewer, so the HTML is only a nicer way to read them.