From: terje.mathisen@nospicedham.tmsw.no   
      
   Martin Str|mberg wrote:   
   > _I_ didn't limit me to only base64 characters. Because as I wanted my   
   > program to run on a 8086 and as there is no popa, I had to use pop %bx   
   > and friends. Otherwise mission impossible.   
      
   My first almost-MIME version did indeed need a POP BX becasue I wanted   
   to be 8088-compatible, then I realized that POPA would in fact work on   
   all (at the time: 1995) available machines outside museums.   
   >   
   > If you can show us a way to get an offset without pop %bx, %bp, %si,   
   > or %di into one(all?) of these registers (8086 code, .COM text file,   
   > base64), I'd be grateful. Currently we seem to think it's impossible.   
      
   It isn't impossible if you instead allow some extra restrictions on what   
   the intial registers may contain, I believe I have once seen a program   
   using _only_ ascii letters and digits, plus normal period and comma   
   (possibly question marks) for punctuation. The key was that most of the   
   cpu and instructions were considered NOPs so that they could write a   
   program to construct arbitrary code based on normal english words.   
   >   
   >   
   > As to why the self-commited limit, no reason. You just decide on the   
   > rules and hack away. Obviously Terje and Kerr(?) decided they wanted   
   > those rules. I wanted my 8086 rule. You can decide to follow other   
   > rules. It was just a fun and challenging exercise.   
   >   
      
   Exactly right.   
      
   >   
   >> So our current 209 Byte decode + Hello World can be reduced by many   
   >> bytes if we ignore this restrictions and just use what all standard   
   >> gateways will support.   
   >   
   > The mail things of old were easy to break as some parts only supported   
   > this and other parts only supported that. Now (probably) the odd   
   > computers and routers and whatever have been replaced and the new ones   
   > are more compatible.   
   >   
   > So you decide the rules and tell and show us (if you want).   
   >   
   :-)   
      
   Terje   
      
      
   --   
   -    
   "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)