The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation

A Windows x86-32 emulator team discovered a program that used an extremely inefficient "optimization" to initialize 64KB of stack memory—the compiler had unrolled a loop into 65,536 individual instructions spanning 256KB of code instead of using a simple loop. The emulator team was so offended by this terrible code that they added special detection logic to their binary translator to replace the bloated function with an efficient tight loop during emulation.