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Today I learned that a standard bar code holds 95 bits of information. Can anything interesting be done with 95 bits (besides a bar code).

That's exactly 11.87500 8-bit ascii characters. "Hello World" will fit.

11 and a bit bytes? A short bit of text, a long number, or a very small number of instructions for an exe (there are demos that small, but calling them 'demos' really is stretching it)

THIS ! OR THIS

Using a 4bit cpu like the intel 4004 could help you fit a little more.

or brainfuck, since there are only 8 instructions, an opcode can fit in only 3 bits, thus leaving 95 bits / 3 = 31 commands ! WOW

i was just thinking, with some kind of VM with a demo-centric instruction set of just a few instructions a bar code demo compo would be just about possible

39614081257132168796771975168 different things.

psonice: write a demo player for barcodes... kind of like barcode battler for demos

hmmm... actually... can i delete that last post and keep the idea for myself?

I was just about to post what evilpaul said :)

sure, just use the delete button

you can also store "goatse.cx" url, thus leaving very usefull information to future generations who will find you barcode...

lol just got a strange idea: we could use it to idenitfy products in our store and we won't have to remember the price for every product!

xeron: then how about we make it cross platform too? you do the amiga player and i'll do the speccy one. same barcode proceduraly generating the same demo on different platforms..

paul: is there a bar code reader for these platforms?

haha.. good point - no*
but, hey, it's only 11.87500 characters :D

* ok, there probably are

11.875 characters if you can type the full 256 characters ;) Some kind of alphanumeric "democode" would be cool though, and not all that much longer.

Any system with an api accessible camera on it would work really well though. Do we need a fixed screen size so it's multi-platform?

Android has a nice camera api for which a barcode reader (and a game, in the market) has been made...

Yeeeeah!

no, let the different platforms interpret the data slightly differently if they need to - they don't need to be exactly the same

actually considered a multi-platform demo (two platforms using the same data) a while ago but never got around to making it

a werkzeug stacking system storing only boxes on barcode would be very cool.

eg :
000 = cube
001 = sphere
010 = rotate
011 = translate
100 = resize
101 = multiply
110 = add
111 = color

So has iphone, probably winmobile + symbian too. OSX has camera support, not sure about windows. Flash has camera support so a flash port is possible...

paul: just thinking if it does basic writing pixels stuff, it's handy to know when the end of the row arrives :)

Next up: The barcode scroller. Uhm.... yeah... everyone get your PDA/phone up to the bigscreen and snap away to see what it says...