3 ms·

> if not cheating then certainly leaning heavily on the rules How so?

• TillE 3y ago
  The description implies they found some clever way to trick iocccsize at the time. Using the current version of iocccsize, it weighs in at 3842, well over the max of 2053. https://www.ioccc.org/2013/cable3/hint.html https://www.ioccc.org/2013/cable3/hint.html
  • lifthrasiir 3y ago
    No, `iocccsize` has been updated throughout the history of the contest. The hints mention this, but the accepted secondary size for `cable3.c` was 1,977 tokens. (Later versions of `iocccsize` don't compute secondary sizes at all.) As far as I can tell, the actual abuse here was the inclusion of instruction decoding table in the custom BIOS which didn't count towards the total size at all: > This conversion, along with instruction lengths and how each instruction modifies the flags, is assisted by some lookup tables which form part of the BIOS binary.
• wzdd 3y ago
  The BIOS file doesn't just contain what you'd expect from a normal PC BIOS, but also contains several tables used by the emulator for decoding of x86 instructions. Normally those tables would be in code as they're necessary regardless of BIOS implementation; they're presumably in the BIOS to save space.
  • rep_lodsb 3y ago
    Maybe one way to look at it other than "cheating" is that it's simulating a fictional x86-like processor which uses an external ROM for microcode.