A bootable Pac-Man clone that fits inside the Master Boot Record
This tiny version of Pac-Man (only 510 bytes of code) fits inside the Master Boot Record of a USB stick.
To run it you need a version of NASM (I used 2.11, newer versions should also work) and either a system emulator
(the make file contains a rule to run Boot-Man with the Qemu emulator) or a low level tool such as HDD Raw copy tool to store the binary
in the first sector of a USB stick. Be warned however: since Boot-Man uses every available byte on the boot
sector, no space is available for a partition table. Therefore the USB stick cannot be used for anything else,
and all data on the USB stick is lost when storing Boot-Man on it. I did not yet test thoroughly if Boot-Man
actually boots on all PCs. If it does not on your machine, please let me know and I can see what can be done
about it.
Happy booting!
Edit: I have since tried Boot-Man on a number of different machines, and results have been mixed:
- My old Dell Latitude E6220 boots Boot-Man just fine, in Legacy BIOS mode, setting the boot device to "USB storage device".
- My brand-new Asus ZenBook can only boot in UEFI mode, not in Legacy BIOS mode. So this laptop cannot boot Boot-Man from USB stick.
- My primary desktop PC (which has a MSI Z170A PC-MATE (MS-7971) main board) can boot in both UEFI and Legacy modes, and will boot Boot-Man when I specify the boot device as "Legacy / USB Key". If I specify the boot device as some other USB device (USB hard disk, USB FDD, USB CDROM) it does not work.
- My old Acer Aspire V3-571G laptop can do legacy BIOS boot, but does not have an option to boot from USB Key. I tried booting from USB Disk, USB FDD and USB CDROM but neither of them works.
So, what do you have to do to boot Boot-Man on your machine? First, enable Legacy BIOS in the BIOS setup. If that is not possible, you cannot boot Boot-Man (but you can still run it in Qemu). Then, use "USB Storage device" or "USB key" or some such generic USB device as the boot device. Using USB Harddisk, USB Floppy Disk or USB CD-ROM will not work.
Legacy BIOS is on its way out (finally, after almost 40 years!) and UEFI is the future. So it seems that the days of Boot-Man are, sadly, numbered.