These days, bootstrapping a computer is a pretty straight forward process, at least as far as the user is concerned. But in the olden days, one would have to manually flick switches entering binary code to get the computer to boot. While certainly not as painstaking as manually flipping bits, these games written for UEFI systems hearken back to the days when accessing your computer was a touch more complicated than pressing a power button.
The repository features five games ranging from a falling ball maze to an age verification quiz. The one thing they all have in common is that to complete system boot, you need to win. All are available in UEFI modules which can not only run in QEMU virtual machines, but bare metal if you so choose.
In no particular order, the games featured are a User Evaluation For Ineptness, which presents a simple addition problem for the user to complete. Insult Sword Fighting, which requires the user to select the correct come back to a prompted insult. Fall To Boot, a falling ball maze navigation game. Age Verification, a set of questions about 80s culture to prove the user is old enough to use the computer. And finally, UEFI Says, a simple memory game.
All of these games are fairly simple, but it’s rather fun to see them built using EDK II as a UEFI module. Let us know down in the comments which is your favorite. And if you’re running an ARM computer, you too can join in on the fun!
Thanks [thatsgrand] for the tip!
This is silly, fun hack. Exactly what I come here for. I think speech recog let you down on “bare mettle”.
It could be an ad for the game: “Do you have the bare mettle it takes to boot from bare metal?”
Love the Monkey Island fight-response selector :)
“I am rubber, you are glue”
Remember in the first game that the battle with the Sword Master cunningly paired the responses you’d learned, with completely unfamiliar (but still matching) insults? Genius.
Getting today’s pedantry out of my system: “pain staking” should be “painstaking” (as in “pains taking”, or “taking pains [to do something well or carefully]”. Staking out pain is an intriguing thought, but probably not what the author intended.
Maybe that’s a new form of extreme acupuncture?
Current spellcheckers often put spaces in words that are not suppose to have spaces.
I wonder what that is all about.
Waking up confused after an epileptic attack you don’t need games to make booting up your computer a major challenge. A simple BitLocker password screen is more than enough.
Solving Secret of the Monkey Island puzzles is age verification as well… And a great idea (not that I would use it on my computer)!
So I don’t really know the guts of UEFI, but you can burn these into expansion cards as extensions modules, right?
yep
Didn’t Leisure Suit Larry use the same type of age verification in (at least) one of their games?
Yes, I think that’s what it’s a reference to
http://www.erikyyy.de/invaders/ grub invaders
Well at least with a PDP8 once you booted by flipping the switches, it stayed booted.
It only had 8 k of core and a paper tape reader, but turning the power off wasn’t an issue. Sometimes you would power it off to move it into another room because it was so damned loud and hot.
Wow, looks like it’s a good way for video game preservation, many old games fail to run on new OS, with the UEFIGames concept it’s possible to run games after some 20 years as long as there are still x64 UEFI machines :)