x86 boot-sector program that shows a rainbow-coloured "Joyeux Noël, Alexis !" ("Happy Holidays, Alexis!" in French) message on the screen with a simple snow simulation. The snow will pile up on the ground and on the text, eventually covering the screen entirely.
Technically it's a boot sector + another for some of the graphics (total 1024 bytes), as even compressed they wouldn't fit in a single sector.
Assembly:
nasm -f bin boot.asm -o boot.binRunning (in QEMU):
qemu-system-x86_64 -drive format=raw,file=boot.binYou can also totally flash this to a USB drive and boot from it on bare metal and it should work. You just need to make sure CSM is enabled on UEFI-only systems.
Calling this "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" because apparently "Happy Holidays" is "woke" and there's this war on Christmas apparently and I don't know exactly what the deal is but some losers get worked up by this and I think it's funny.
This was meant as a riddle for Alexis to solve during a secret Santa. The hexdump was printed out on a piece of paper with no further explanation:
Ben inspired me to do this, this is not an original idea :)
The following pattern:
mov cl, [es:di]
test cl, cl
Can be simplified with just a single cmp.