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There are loads of emojis, and many of them start with F0 9F followed by two more bytes, and many of those other two-byte combinations are surely also valid machine code. Could one create a meaningful executable program consisting entirely of emojis? The answer is yes, and [GloriousCow] crafted a simple Hello World program to demonstrate.
The simple program looks like this: 🐸☺️🐰🐎♐🗃️🧯🧯🧯🐮💗🦮♐🐰🐹🗃️🧯🧯🧯🧯💗🪗🧯😗🧮😗🧮😗🐮😪😔⭐. Save that string of emojis to a file, give it a .com extension, and run it in DOSBox with CPU type set to 8086. It’ll print HELLO at the bottom-right of the screen by writing directly to video memory.
There are loads more details on the original blog post, including plenty of rere’s also a much more involved VGA demo program made from emojis, so give it a look
Some of you may be aware that ASCII characters can also be used in a similar way (and more flexibly, since they are not four-byte combinations like emojis). This was used in BASIC programs as a way to cleverly embed machine code in things like REM statements, creating odd-looking code that did things in BASIC that shouldn’t have been possible.
