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You are here: Home / Uncategorized / VMware nested easter egg

VMware nested easter egg

09.18.2013 by William Lam // 10 Comments

It is only fitting that if a VMware Engineer adds a hidden easter egg, that it would of course contain another nested easter egg! For those of you who are not familiar with the vPong easter egg, Raphael Schitz wrote an article about a year ago regarding this little nugget which is when I first learned about this as well.

The easter egg allows you to play a game of old school pong using either VMware Fusion, Workstation, Player and it even works on vSphere. To enable this easter egg, you just need to mount a 0 byte floppy image located on your desktop (not a datastore) to a virtual machine and power it up.

Here is a screenshot of mounting a dummy floppy image which I created using the "touch" command on my Mac OS X system and connecting it to a Fusion VM:

Once you power on the VM, you should now see a game of vPong in the VM console which you can then play against the computer using your mouse.

One would think the easter egg stops there, but nope, there is actually more. If you click into the VM console and type the word "pride" (all lower case), you will see that the black/white vPong game will now change to color! To disable the color, you just need to type the word "pride" again and it will go back to black/white.

I thought this was actually pretty cool and thanks to Regis Duchesne for sharing this tidbit! So the next time you are bored, you can always kill some time with the classic black/white pong or go for the more colorful version 🙂

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Categories // Uncategorized Tags // easter egg, esxi, fusion, nested, pong, vpong, vSphere, workstation

Comments

  1. Abdullah Abdullah says

    09/18/2013 at 7:22 pm

    Great finding :), sadly it didn't work on ESXi 5.1 only on Workstation for now.

    Thanks again ^_^.

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      09/19/2013 at 3:21 am

      I've verified this works on both ESXi 5.1 & 5.5, make sure you're mounting a 0 byte floppy & not an ISO.

      Reply
    • James Green says

      09/19/2013 at 1:30 pm

      I think the key is that it needs to try to boot to the 0B floppy. I had trouble too (ESXi 5.1), but once I removed the NIC so it couldn't PXE boot and specified the floppy as the first boot device, then it worked. Great fun! 🙂

      Reply
    • Unknown says

      09/19/2013 at 3:25 pm

      This is awesome. Just tested on the Mac, works like a champ. Thanks!

      Reply
  2. jrishel says

    09/20/2013 at 9:09 pm

    not getting it with ESXi 5.1, do you need to have the VM OS type set to something specific? I tried Linux and Windows.

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      09/20/2013 at 9:18 pm

      Make sure the floppy is being as the first boot device. It can be a dummy VM, no requirements.

      Reply
  3. Boris says

    09/16/2015 at 4:23 pm

    Damn, doesn't seem to work in VMFusion 8. Tried booting off floppy. 0 byte *.flp file. Operating system not found

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. VMware Has An Easter Egg In Its Easter Egg | Lifehacker Australia says:
    08/21/2014 at 9:32 pm

    […] VMware nested easter egg [Virtually Ghetto] […]

    Reply
  2. VMworld 2014, New Stuff, Pac-Man, and VMware Pong says:
    08/24/2014 at 4:46 am

    […] to get to VMware's most famous easter egg: VMware pong (credit goes to William Lam and his post at virtuallyGhetto which has screen […]

    Reply
  3. New VEBA release, new website and new mascot! says:
    05/12/2020 at 8:24 am

    […] part of the DCUI development planning, I was reminded of this fun little VMware Easter Egg. I thought it would be fun to include a few of our own and also give a nod back to this old school […]

    Reply

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William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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