Retro enthusiast injects Snake game into vintage S3 graphics card VBIOS — enjoy some serpentum fun while your old PC boots

Retro enthusiast injects Snake game into vintage S3 graphics card VBIOS — enjoy some serpentum fun while your old PC boots

Please note that USB keyboards don’t work with this implementation of Snake 512. Also, there is no sound. However, with everything running as intended, Bits und Bolts moves on to some further customization – editing the Snake 512 game colors (in Ghidra again). The vintage computing enthusiast had previously bookmarked sections of the code where colors for the border, background, snake head, snake body, and others were defined. Now these were edited to other values from the VGA color palette using hex values for appropriate rows/columns. At the end of the video, with everything working and colored as intended, the TechTuber quips, “Who says the ViRGE can’t play games?”

The last time we wrote about the escapades of Bits und Bolts was when they modded the S3 ViRGE DX VBIOS to disable the ‘pedestal bit,’ which caused S3 graphics blacks to be rendered as a dark grey. We’ve also previously reported on a Doom port that was released as a Coreboot BIOS payload (of course, it is too big to actually go in the BIOS).

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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-23/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Mark Tyson Social Links Navigation News Editor Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

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