I love the tricks that can be done with the old COM format. It's so versatile and simple, its almost like scripting. You can even make it ASCII clean while reta

I love the tricks that can be done with the old COM format. It's so versatile and simple, its almost like scripting. You can even make it ASCII clean while retaining some semblence of turing completeness! I had a weird and pointless project somewhat recently where I wanted to bootstrap a programming environment using only the stock tools on NT 4. I didn't actually finish, but what I did write was pretty contrived. I wrote some code for JScript, which had to run in IE since there was no scripthost, and it would parse some horrible language using a very inefficient IE3 JScript compatible implementation of parser combinators and generate x86 code... And output it in base64 into a textarea. Which I would then need to somehow get back into proper binary data... So my approach was to write a small DOS compatible COM binary with a really simple base64 decode routine. I'd do this with the DEBUG command, and save it to disk. Then, I'd use redirection in command prompt to feed it base64 and redirect the output to a file. I was pretty ecstatic to see this awful hack job working somewhat end-to-end. (I don't have the code, I think it got wiped out when the drive in the laptop I was doing this whole game on died. But it was quite straightforward to implement base64 in very little code; I believe what I wound up doing was accumulating 3 bytes of output from 4 bytes of input with a few conditionals to shift base64 symbols into the corresponding bits and then just some shifting and ORing. No LUTs necessary.)