I ran a patched version of it on WinXP (DOS NTVDM), the sound works there! But it requires a few extra bytes to enable MIDI UART Mode first. On DosBox-X, this can simply be set in the config ;)
How they pulled that off on a stock A500 (okay, a stock A500 with 512kb RAM expansion, but still) is far beyond me. It's pretty awesome and really deserved the 1st place
For all lovers of 256Bb intros (and 128,64 and so on)
there is a curated "best of" selection maintained by
Demosceners : https://nanogems.demozoo.org/#256_byte_intros
"A mind is born" is of course included there =)
The demoscene has a curated collection of "best 16 bytes ever"
https://nanogems.demozoo.org/#16_byte_intros
As well as 32,64 and so on ...
It even goes down to 8(!) Byte productions
Well, it would be 2^(7*8) = 72057594037927936 possible intros. Someone/something has to generate, run and evaluate them all. Theoretically it's the "halting problem" all over, to wait for the "final output" of each intro. The 16 byte effect for example takes a while to achieve its final form. So even if it is somehow managed to evaluate 1000 intros per second, we are looking at about 2 million years of time to really test ALL possible 7 byte intros.
I think there are some standard header bytes, so the number of combinations of the interesting parts might be much smaller. Also I said less than 7 bytes, so it's actually 281474976710656 . If header bytes reduce 1 or 2 bytes, it will be 4294967296 - 1099511627776. 1099511627776 / 1000 / 60 / 60 / 24 / 365 is around 35 years.
and yes, your observations are spot on.