4043 byte PC emulator (2013)

http://ioccc.org/2013/cable3/hint.html

by luu • 8 years ago

126 22 8 years ago

ioccc.org

berbec• 8 years ago

Code golfing taken to its extreme can be as scary as other extremists.

Stratoscope2• 8 years ago

This is awesome!

I would love to see a version of it written to be as readable as possible. (If there is such a thing already out there, pointers are welcome, thanks!)

torgoguys• 8 years ago

Here is the fully commented, non obfuscated version of this same emulator: https://github.com/adriancable/8086tiny

Stratoscope2• 8 years ago

Sweet!

That is some nice code, many thanks for the link.

fernly• 8 years ago

Oddly, megalith.co.uk, specified in both the OP page and on the github header, is now "for sale".

Edit: 8086tiny.freeforums.net is functional and has had a few recent posts.

TorKlingberg• 8 years ago

The Internet Archive has a working copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20150424213422/http://www.megali...

tasty_freeze• 8 years ago

Link to the IOCCC source code:

http://ioccc.org/2013/cable3/cable3.c

There are some nice easter eggs in the source

dokem• 8 years ago

That's gotta be generated with a tool, right?

jibanes• 8 years ago

yes

jstanley• 8 years ago

Not necessarily. The first part is clearly hand-edited at minimum, if not completely handwritten:

    I n t,e,l[80186],*E,m,u,L,a,T,o,r

lifthrasiir2• 8 years ago

Uh, not really? I'm pretty sure that identifiers are automatically replaced somehow with conventional editors but a general minification to the degree required by IOCCC is never automatic.

If you are interested in an actual minification process of a winning IOCCC entry, Don Yang [1], who has eight (!) winning entries, has put a compressed screencast alongside with recent winning entries (example: [2] is a screencast for [3]). My experience (I too have one winning entry) had been similar.

[1] http://uguu.org/

[2] http://ioccc.org/2018/yang/spoiler.html

[3] http://ioccc.org/2018/yang/prog.c

pjc502• 8 years ago

Possibly there were some assisting tools, but most likely nothing more complicated than search-and-replace. Handcrafting these things is the whole art of the IOCCC.

Many years ago I wrote some obfuscated Perl, assisted by the fact that the language is pretty obfuscated to start with. https://flatline.org.uk/snowflake.pl.txt - I think I may have had a tool to help it fit the template, but since you can't have a space in the middle of an operator restructuring the program to make the operators fit the snowflake was a major part of the effort.

While there's an "unobfuscated" version of the emulator program in this thread, it's clearly not the same program - there's no "switch/case" in the obfuscated version.

basementcat• 8 years ago

I think this “cheats” a bit by putting quite a bit of emulator functionality in the custom bios image. Nevertheless very impressive.

szc3• 8 years ago

The "cheats" are 1879 bytes of table data stored in the bios image :-).

If you liked this, I also suggest take a look at Christopher Mills entry from 2018, which is a PDP-7 emulator, which doesn't use the BIOS tables trick.

http://www.ioccc.org/2018/mills/hint.html

[disclaimer: I am an IOCCC Judge]

jacobush• 8 years ago

I didn't get it until I read the page. 4043 bytes, 8086 nibbles!

4043 byte PC emulator (2013)

Related Stories