When is it cheating?

Trying to do #AdventOfCode on my 8k PET (I’ll use the Tynemouth 32k board when I have to). In 1979 no one would store data like this. So I’m trying to decide if it’s cheating to pre scrub the data into a 1979 format before working on these. The issue with that is that 75% of today’s challenge is the parsing.