The Goat Emoji Is 100% Valid Machine Code, And It Doesn’t Stop There

November 6, 2026 by 3 Comments

Did you know emojis can be executables? Well, they are if you treat them like Intel 8088 or 8086 machine code, anyway. [GloriousCow] shared this clever revelation, demonstrating that executable programs could be created entirely from emojis. To really appreciate why, it’s necessary to take a small step back.

It all started when [GloriousCow] happened to notice, entirely by chance, that 🐐 (the goat emoji) was F0 9F 90 90. Anyone familiar with x86 assembly language probably recognizes 90h as nop,  or null operation, or “spend a cycle doing nothing”. What about F0 and 9F? Together they are lock lahf (assert the bus lock signal then copy some status flags into register AH) which, on an 8088 and 8086, essentially does nothing.

This means the goat emoji (F0 9F 90 90) is 100% technically valid machine code. It doesn’t do anything, but here’s where it gets even more interesting.

A short string of emojis is machine code that writes HELLO (lower right) by writing directly to video memory.

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 resources and tips for writing your own executables with emojis. There’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.

Making Xibalba 64, A New N64 Release In 2026

November 6, 2026 by No comments

[Dominic Szablewski] created something that we don’t see every day: a no-kidding new physical Nintendo 64 game for sale, complete with cartridge, manual, and box art. He wrote about what it was like to make Xibalba 64, a 3D FPS game built using his own game engine. It even supports two-player couch co-op and four-player deathmatch.

The N64 was a groundbreaking console that brought analog controls and fully 3D game worlds to mainstream console gaming. Architecture-wise it has its share of quirks, including a tiny (4 kB!) amount of texture memory to go around all that fancy 3D content.

Xibalba was originally a demo game for [Dominic]’s MIT-licensed game engine, high_impact. Turning it into a full-fledged title for the N64 meant revisiting all sorts of things from level and gameplay design to sound and music. [Dominic] talks about it all, including the fact that his engine is technically for 2D content but he makes it work for the 3D game by ensuring levels have no elevation. Since levels are flat, the engine never has to deal with a dimension beyond its understanding. Xibalba 64 even maintains a stable 60 frames per second, dipping somewhat only in four-player split-screen.

The N64 still gets a lot of action from dedicated enthusiasts, and there’s no need to start from scratch if you find yourself with a retro gaming itch and a desire to push a vintage console in directions it never knew. For example, we’ve seen an open world game engine for the N64, complete with long drawing distances that didn’t seem possible on the hardware.

Translating An Old Display To A New One

November 5, 2026 by 12 Comments

A quick search through AliExpress will find PCBs that take HDMI or VGA and translate them to DSI lanes for TFT panels, and even boards that translate DSI to HDMI in the other direction. Usually they need dedicated silicon or if you’re doing it yourself, an FPGA, but depending on the display that need not be the case. As an example, [Voltage Ventures] has replaced a defective STN display with a more modern one using nothing more complex than a Raspberry Pi Pico.

The display comes as part of a Samsung cash register that looks as though it comes from the 1990s, which is in keeping with it having a monochrome STN display. A replacement was going to cost a fortune, so some way of translating between the two was in order. It has a 4-bit data bus, so there’s a description of how they sampled the bus and identified the timing used. It’s hardly the highest resolution display by today’s standards, being a meager 320 by 240 pixels. Once the format is known it’s a case of transposing it to monochrome VGA in the microcontroller. Initial work was done with an STM series chip, later this was moved to the RP2040.

We like this project, and it’s a reminder that even something broken and old can still be rescued.

Reviving Google Cardboard, Without Google Or Cardboard

November 5, 2026 by 3 Comments

Remember Google Cardboard? The late, unlamented practice of strapping a phone to your face so you could get motion sickness in a virtual environment? [brenpoly] wants you to reconsider, because in the years since Google pulled the plug on mobile VR, phones have gotten really, really good and he’s got a project called CardboardXR on GitHub that the project video enbedded below bills as “A 5$ Apple Vision Pro”

Well, it’s 5$ if you already happen to have a flagship phone like the Pixel 9 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro he’s using for testing– otherwise you’d be out a rather larger chunk of change in order to pick up such a pocket supercomputer. In any case, he’s able to get 6 Degree of Freedom (DOF) tracking from these units, along with using the cameras for passthrough and object detection, hand tracking, and gesture control– everything the big boys net you, in other words. That’s pretty impressive compared to the 3DOF, and zero tracking or pass-through mobile VR used to get you.

He’s also built adjustable optics into his 3D-printed replacement for Google’s old face-hugging cardboard, which you can get on Makerworld.  On the other hand, presumably you could just cut a hole for the camera bumps in one of those if you’re the kind of person who throws nothing out. Either way you’d be using the same lenses; it turns out they’re still available online, so that’s what [brenpoly] spec’d.

All these fancy features aren’t entirely [brenpoly]’s own work: his software is based on Unity which has some slick VR/AR tools and the ability to build in all the relevant machine learning models for things like hand tracking. He’s also taking some major inspiration from the Google Cardboard SDK, which Google open-sourced back around the time they gave up on it. It’s still a very impressive project regardless of the toolchain involved, though there’s a certain irony that [brenpoly] is now strapping a phone to his face after his last project we featured  was all about getting him to put it down.

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Stunning Volumetric 3D Display Goes For A Spin

November 5, 2026 by 7 Comments

[AncientJames] gives us a detailed look at Vortex, one of his impressive volumetric displays made with two back-to-back LED panels that spin at high speed with a Raspberry Pi 4 driving it all. Vortex generates a true 3D image hanging in space that one can move around, and look at from different angles independent of anything else. The software for Vortex is up on GitHub which includes a simulator as well as CAD models for the 3D-printed parts.

The images move, but can also be viewed from any angle.

Accomplishing what Vortex does requires precisely matching the images rendered on the panels to the physical rotation. If there’s a mismatch, the displayed 3D image will drift, or appear distorted. There’s also the physical matter of ensuring the spinning elements are balanced and stable while spinning at high speeds, a nontrivial undertaking that involved more than a little trial and error.

The amazing build quality and attention to detail really shines through, not just with the design but with smart use of off-the-shelf items like a large plastic globe for the display cover. [AncientJames] uses what looks like a plastic globe shade meant for a lighting fixture, and designs a clever fixture that attaches to a small rotary tool with a cutting wheel. With that, he can carefully and precisely cut away the unneeded section. Here’s a link to him doing so (at the 15:17 mark) in the video; sometimes it’s worth making a one-off gadget if it helps get a job done right.

[AncientJames] has made many volumetric displays in the past, and they’re each a little different. Check out one that spins a perforated drum around LED panels to create a lightfield display, instead of spinning the panels themselves.

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A Tiny OS For A Tiny Board

November 5, 2026 by 19 Comments

As microntrollers have become ever more powerful, we have started to see an increasing number of operating systems written to take advantage of this extra power. Usually they’re aimed at handheld or other similar devices with support for screens and input devices, but just what can be done if a developer eschews those niceties? KoaOS is a small OS for the ESP32-S3 on the Heltec WiFi LoRa 32 V4, and it’s headless. You can only talk to it via a serial terminal on its USB port.

What it provides is a UNIX-like shell, with editor, GPS, weather and APRS apps ready to run. It’s not just limited to those, there’s an SDK of sorts to create new apps and compile them from C. These .esp files can be installed and uninstalled at will over the network.

There are a few limitations, for example it’s only for the Heltec V4 due to a large requirement for PSRAM. We are guessing that another similar spec board could probably be made to perform, however it’s clear that hasn’t yet been done. Despite that we think this OS is interesting for concentrating on the OS rather than the interface, and we hope to see it develop further.

Several takes on an ESP32 OS have appeared in recent times, including this JavaScript one.

Folding Wings Could Be The Future For Air Travel

November 5, 2026 by 11 Comments

Folding wings have a long history in aviation. Particularly in the military world, where the ability to fit more fighting planes on a boat made a very real difference to the outcomes of a combat situation. In civil aviation, though, particularly at commercial scales, the idea has been less popular.

As unattractive as complexity can be, the push for ever greater efficiency and performance may be changing things in this space. In coming years, you might find yourself boarding an airliner and watching the wings fold out prior to take off, in a way that once unthinkable for a conventional commercial aircraft.

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