UEFIGame

For something lighter, I wanted to mention a package of "UEFI games" called, appropriately enough, UEFIGame.

The story is actually pretty hilarious—Mr. Alejandro Armas created UEFIGame (on GitHub) to get some experience building with EDK2.  He decided to make a set of games, or "challenges", where if you get them correct, the system will proceed to boot; otherwise the system shuts off!

There are five games:

1.  User Evaluation For Ineptness: Presents a simple math question, the sum of two random numbers from 0 to 99.  If your answer is incorrect the system mocks you and shuts down.  For example, I got a question wrong, and was told "Please do not use computers".  😄

2.  Insult Sword Fighting:  This one I personally could not get working, but the way it works is that there is an insults.txt text file containing a bunch of insults and "correct" responses.  You have to use the correct response to the computer's insult!

3.  Fall To Boot: This is a vertical scrolling game where a tunnel is dynamically generated by the program. Using the cursor keys to move the "*", you have to reach the bottom of the screen or the system shuts down.  This was really tough for me—maybe my computer is too fast!

4.  Age Verification: Here, you answer 80s pop culture trivia to prove you're a Gen X-er. Get it wrong and the system decides you're too young to use the computer.  I get the distinct impression that Alejandro is Gen X!

5. UEFI Says: This is an implementation of the Simon game. The four colors of the original game are mapped to the inverted T cursor keys on your keyboard.  The program will flash a colored block, representing one of the cursor keys, and you have to follow the same pattern.  Win to boot, or fail and shutdown.

I downloaded from the latest release, put them on a USB flash drive with a UEFI Shell, and booted on a modern system.  They worked and were fun!  The UEFI Says game was especially well done and enjoyable—it made me wish the game kept going.  (PR anyone? 😃)

I was also able to build them by putting the source code into a standard EDK2 build directory structure and running:  build -p UefiGamePkg\UefiGamePkg.dsc.  Note that if you're building with Visual Studio, you may see some warnings which get treated as errors.

Anyway, play around with these games in your spare time, they're pretty fun.  Thanks Alejandro!