Is there any way of crushing a PE to the smallest size possible? Even more so that it almost breaks the PE but still runs.

I am on a Windows 11 x64 OS and have been playing around with assembly after my little C episode. Since programming in C it was my journey to create the smallest possible executable with the same functionality that I desired. Because of this desire, and moved to assembly and have been practicing there.

I recently watched InkBox’s video posted where he crush an EXE to 268 Bytes ! I figured I would try the same thing but with the functionality I desire. When I got to actually coding in ENTRY, when I went to assembly my file, it would always be broken.

I will show to code blocks, one in which is working, and one that I attempted to have small, but was not working.

I need someone to explain to me what the issue is with breaking the headers and how that correlates to the execution of code in my second example.