Emojis Become Unlikely Programming Language

In a surprising discovery, GitHub user dbalsom built a web-based x86 disassembler as a side project. While testing it out, he noticed that pasting a goat emoji (🐐) into the tool encoded it as 'F0 9F 90 90', valid instructions for the 8088 chip used in the original IBM PC.

This sparked dbalsom's curiosity: could he write an 8088 program using only displayable emojis? The answer turned out to be yes. Most emojis start with the same 'F0 9F' byte sequence, giving him a large collection of characters to work with.

dbalsom built actual working programs using these emojis, including one that prints 'HELLO' and another graphics demo hundreds of emojis long that runs in DOSBox. He even joked about constructing an emoji BIOS or operating system, or even EmojiDOOM.