Author:

• Name: jingp49
  Location: TW - Taiwan

Award presentation:

Watch the Our Favorite Universe YouTube show for this entry:

IOCCC29 - 2025/jingp49 - Who won award

To build:

    make all

To use:

    ./prog columns lines

Try:

    ./try.sh

Judges’ remarks:

This program is definitely bigger on the inside than the outside. Can you find out where the volume of output comes from in the prog.c source code?

A fun challenge

Please checkout the fun challenge(s) for this winning entry.

Author’s remarks:

1963 Doctor Who title sequence

This is an ASCII animation resembling the 1963 Doctor Who title sequence.

How to run

    ./prog width height

The first argument after “./prog” should a positive integer that is smaller than your terminal width (in characters), and the next argument being positive integer smaller than your terminal height (in characters). Please do not enter a negative number.

It’s recommended that the width to be at least 120 characters and height to be at least 30 characters for a clearer animation. Also, the program assumes the terminal to be a “black background” and “white text” one, please flip the ASCII brightness map if you are using a terminal with a “light color background. and”dark color text”. Lastly, the terminal must support ANSI escape codes to work properly.

Overview

From 1963 to 1973, the title sequences in the BBC Sci-Fi show Doctor Who was made using a technique called “HowlRound” effect, which is done by pointing a camera to its output. This program simulates the “HowlRound” effect by first scanning a portion of the screen buffer, enlarging it and storing it into a temporary buffer same size as the screen buffer, then copy everything back into the screen buffer, resulting in a continuous video feedback.

Obfuscations and Features

• Box shaped formatting (possibly caused by a broken chameleon circuit)
• “while loop” instead of “for loop” for output and scanning buffers
• “for loop” instead of “while loop” for the animation’s main loop
• Uninitialized variable instead of time(0) for srand(t) seed (time(0) unusable during time travel flight)
• “prog.c” does not appear bigger on the inside upon opening it

Warnings

• Flickering on the screen may not be suitable for people with photosensitive epilepsy

Portability

This code is tested on : - Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS on Windows 10 x86_64 - Debian GNU/Linux 12 (BookWorm) x86_64

This code is NOT tested on : - TT capsule computer system

Primary files

• prog.c - entry source code
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• prog.orig.c - original source code
• try.sh - script to try entry

Secondary files

• 2025_jingp49.tar.bz2 - download entry tarball
• README.md - markdown source for this web page
• .entry.json - entry summary and manifest in JSON
• .gitignore - list of files that should not be committed under git
• .path - directory path from top level directory
• .date-range - copyright date range for this directory
• index.html - this web page

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