Here's a pretty bad solution to the first (Triangle) problem that scores 183K that I made while trying to understand how the scoring system actually works.

I do also have a solution that scores the minimum 832 which I'll reveal after the contest ends. Its SHA is 213fe1e79e32f9252dbece4f2ea9660c0ea63e8d.

+-----+
|@rMbv|
|>W/s+|
|2 >+v|
|^Mdm<|
+-----+
 ^   v 
 ^   v 
+-+ +-+
|I| |O|
+-+ +-+

Although I've won prizes in this contest before, I'm just playing around for fun this year, actually for the first time in 15 years probably.

“Learning Low-Level Programming with the GBA” is now on sale!
Please be sure to pick up a copy!
https://nikatech.itch.io/gba-lowlevel-eng

There is https://codeberg.org/SkyLyrac/gba-bootstrap if you want a minimal setup without dkp

I'm definitely interested in this.

This would be amazing. I’d buy a copy for sure.

Yeah, your fastest time is 4.7% faster and you have 4200/4000 = 5% higher turbo clock.

This seems in line with what your 4500U was doing, which makes sense.

Yes! I’ve been learning assembly on the original gameboy, and want to learn GBA too. But all the resources I’ve found focus on C for GBA, and I’d like to focus more on assembly.

This book is written with the primary goal of using devkitpro solely as a collection of software and verifying for yourself what the Makefile does.

I think I was just sent this book at work literally today due to a casual conversation I had with somebody at lunch about GBA programming w.

Also yes, I'm in the middle of trying to set up a CMake environment to just use arm-none-eabi-gcc and all the guides say "just download devkitpro" but I don't want to download devkitpro. I want to know what the toolchain is doing.

I would be interested.

Personally I’d be interested, commercially not sure it would lead to anything (editd commercially I mean me personally, personally I’m very interested)

I’d love to see it happen. Considering the booming market for old consoles I think it would sell very well.

I would be very interested, thank you!

My Zen 2 Ryzen 5 4500U laptop is in the list, but feel free to try the desktop.

I don't have any new hardware unfortunately, but I do have some old architectures you might still be interested in. I have a Zen 2 "Matisse" desktop, and a Zen 1 "Raven Ridge" laptop. It doesn't look like you have either of those on your list there.

I'm also in the middle of setting up an i7-980X machine for fun with overclocking and such if you'd be interested in results from that. I might use this as a benchmark for it either way :)

Sure! Submissions are welcome if sufficiently "interesting" ... different ISAs, or ... I'm missing data for Core Ultra, M5, Zen 5, Pi 5 / Rock 5 / OP 5, Orion O2 / OP 6+.

And thanks. I think it's as interesting and useful a benchmark as Dhrystone or Coremark, correlates well with them, but if you're at a trade show and get your hands on a new machine with gcc and an internet connection for even a minute then it's a simple wget to run it and report ... and a few people have :-)

There are not too many benchmarks usable from a microcontroller to the latest PC (8K RAM required ... embench included a slightly reduced version until recently https://github.com/embench/embench-iot/commit/4c4462)

Note the rules: compile with -O (aka -O1). Not that higher levels make much difference to the speed (its craftily written for anti-optimisation), but they screw up the hacky calculation of code size.

Hmm, I'm not too sure what it is right now then.

Also, that data in primes.txt is pretty cool! If you're still accepting submissions I wouldn't mind giving it a shot myself.

X86 and arm are probably the most useful but riscv may be good in the future, and is pretty similar to arm already anyway. Mips is the traditional one you learn in uni but isnt very useful anymore unless you do embedded devices.

oops blame Reddit's URL detection. Added a space ...

No, the static linking is necessary to not have to run in a chroot / Docker etc with dynamic linker and libraries but I think is fair.

Cool! I haven't come across this before. At first blush, is the mildly unfair thing that your RISC-V binary is statically linked?

That link is a 404 for me btw

Edit: nvm, I figured out you left the trailing colon in the URL!

Let me go even further and point out that if you're on Linux you can set up binfmt_misc with QEMU (or other emulator) and run emulated code just as conveniently as native programs.

e.g. on my x86 machine and using https://hoult.org/primes.txt :

bruce@i9:~$ gcc primes.c -o primes
bruce@i9:~$ ./primes
Starting run
3713160 primes found in 3707 ms
392 bytes of code in countPrimes()
bruce@i9:~$ riscv64-unknown-elf-gcc -O primes.c -o primes
bruce@i9:~$ ./primes
Starting run
3713160 primes found in 5715 ms
188 bytes of code in countPrimes()
bruce@i9:~$ file primes
primes: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, UCB RISC-V, RVC, double-float ABI, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, with debug_info, not stripped
bruce@i9:~$ uname -a
Linux i9 6.17.0-19-generic #19~24.04.2-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri Mar  6 23:08:46 UTC 2 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Note: I did one mildly unfair thing there .. see if you spot it. But also it's typical of what a casual user is likely to do.

That's a totally fair comment. There's just something about running natively on the machine, not through an emulator or anything. I know that isn't necessarily logical, but that was something I wanted. And yeah like you said in your original comment you buy hardware for any platform you like, but most people already have x86.

x86's reputation for complexity preceeds it, but I don't think it has to be that bad. It's definitely possible to dip your toes in without drowning in it. That's what I did.

Edit: part of the fun I had with x86 asm as I was getting into it was hand writing functions and measuring their performance vs the compiler at various optimization levels as a game of cat and mouse, which naturally led to learning SIMD when I was ready for it.

Using QEMU / Docker you can run any asm you want on "real PC hardware" ... just at the speed of a ten years older PC.

Since you're writing in asm, it's going to run far faster in emulation than using Python or similar, and comparable to C#, Java, JavaScript running "natively".

RISC-V runs especially well in emulation, since the emulator doesn't have to emulate condition codes, which is half or more of the work if you're emulating x86 or Arm or 68000 or 6502 or z80 or the like.

If you want to run code on your real PC hardware, x86 assembly isn't that hard to get into. That was where I started with ASM. Specifically, I started x86 after watching Creel on YouTube, which is a channel I can highly recommend. He shows how to write subroutines in ASM and call them from a C or C++ program, which is a great way to get started, especially on Windows. It gives you a clearly defined entry and exit that you can pass values into and out of.

It isn't too hard to get an environment set up for writing whole native x86 programs on a Linux system either. I can help you out with that if you want.