Nintendo kind of did this back in the day with the e-Reader accessory for the Game Boy Advance. It used dot-based "barcodes" to encode NES games onto cards that you scanned and subsequently played from RAM. I imagine that some deft compression and the ARM Thumb instruction set came especially in handy here.

I once again reinvented the wheel, I see Jokes apart, didn't know that! Extremely cool!

It runs locally if you download the "m" and "l" files alongside it (for maps and models), and run it on a localhost server (to fix the CORS errors).

curl "https://phoboslab.org/q1k3/index.html" > index.html

curl "https://phoboslab.org/q1k3/l" > l

curl "https://phoboslab.org/q1k3/m" > m

python -m http.server

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I then zipped it up, and converted that zip file to 7 QR codes, so technically yes, we can fit Quake on a few QR codes.

So bad is not a full html self runnable, I guess it is doable with some quick trickery. In that case, one could build a QR code html interpreter (aka read > output to file > open the file with firefox ) and it would be so cool

I did that trickery and it works: https://github.com/AdrianVollmer/Zundler

(I had to fix the mime type detection and I'll have to push that fix to PyPI, so use the main branch if you want to try it yourself.)

Unfortunately, since we have to ship it with the gzip lib pako.js, the size more than quadruples to 77kb, so no QR code with this approach. Maybe I should look into making compression optional.

You can use DecompressionStream instead of pako.js for all modern browsers. FetchCrunch [1] uses it to generate self-extracting HTML files, which were not portable at that time but now fully portable across browsers.

[1] https://github.com/subzey/fetchcrunch

Very cool. Thanks for letting me know!

Uh uh thats very interesting. I am gonna play with it a lot.

> the size more than quadruples to 77kb, so no QR code with this approach.

OR we can use 25 QR codes haha. Joking, but what about huge QR codes?

This is cool.

I found that the first line didn't work but: curl "https://phoboslab.org/q1k3/" > index.html

did the trick...