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 🙂
Great finding :), sadly it didn't work on ESXi 5.1 only on Workstation for now.
Thanks again ^_^.
I've verified this works on both ESXi 5.1 & 5.5, make sure you're mounting a 0 byte floppy & not an ISO.
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! 🙂
This is awesome. Just tested on the Mac, works like a champ. Thanks!
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.
Make sure the floppy is being as the first boot device. It can be a dummy VM, no requirements.
Damn, doesn't seem to work in VMFusion 8. Tried booting off floppy. 0 byte *.flp file. Operating system not found