Emoji DOS COM File That Prints HELLO

Description

A dark Mastodon screenshot from glorioususcow (@[email protected]), posted 4h ago. The post states that a string of emoji is a valid 141-byte DOS COM executable that prints HELLO in the lower-right corner of the screen: copy it into a text editor, save as EMOJI.COM, and run it in DosBox-X with cpu cputype=8086 and machine cga. Two rows of emoji follow (frog, smile, rabbit, horse, Sagittarius, file cabinet, fire extinguishers, cow, hearts, guide dog, shovel, hamster, accordion, kissing faces, abacuses, sleepy/pensive faces, and a star). It ends, “may god have mercy on my soul.” The trick, from Daniel Balsom’s August 2026 executable-emoji work, is that four-byte UTF-8 emoji often begin F0 9F, which an 8086 in real mode treats as a LOCK prefix plus usable opcodes in a headerless COM binary.