First an oldie but goodie. If you are a hard core emacs user, you probably already know about tetris.el. If not, you might get a kick out of it. Most emacs builds ship with it by default. To activate it simply do:
M-x tetris
If you are emacs-challenged M-x stands for “press Meta key (in most cases Esc will do) and x together”. The effect – a full fledged Tetris game inside of your emacs buffer:
Yes, I took that screenshot on windows. Sue me. Emacs will run anywhere, so there was just no point of booting up Ubuntu on another machine just to take this shot.
The second easter egg you might not know about. It is by no means new, but since I only found out about it today I’m assuming it is not as popular as tetris.el. Here is what you have to do:
Start a OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheet and enter the following formula in any cell and press enter:
=game("StarWars")
Oo.org will pop up a clone of the classic Space Invaders game:
I have no clue why they called this game “StarWars”. The game seems to have several different modes of play, but you can only call it up once per session. If you close the game window, and try to play it again, it won’t let you.
I didn’t mention Book of Mozzila here because just about everyone and their mom knows about it by now, and it’s not as fun as these little two mini-games. :mrgreen: In case you were living under a rock for the past few years, put about:mozilla in the address box of Firefox and enjoy.
Add your favorite software easter egg in the comments.
[tags]easter eggs, easter, tetris.el, tetris, open office.org, hidden games[/tags]
There used to be a fun one in Excel 95 or 97 where you could fly around in a 3D environment, but it’s not in later versions.
Great site: http://www.eeggs.com/ :D
There’s also a noughts and crosses game in OOo – same type of syntax but instead of StarWars you put TicTacToe and you have to specify a 3×3 grid to pay on, which can’t contain the cell you’re typing it into (I can’t remember exactly how to do it so check it out on Google)
Thing is, the damn thing never loses – its always able to force a draw or win and it even tells you so while you’re playing with little “I can guarantee a draw” or “I can guarantee a win in x moves” messages
now that’s odd.. I just got an email to notify me of a comment that is now above mine..
Also, if you know how to do this thing in old versions of Excel I think I have an old Office ’97 disc around somewhere, could be interesting
[quote post=”1526″]There used to be a fun one in Excel 95 or 97 where you could fly around in a 3D environment, but it’s not in later versions.[/quote]
I heard about that, but I didn’t have an old Excel version handy to test it out.
[quote post=”1526″]Thing is, the damn thing never loses – its always able to force a draw or win[/quote]
I think this is a design feature of the game. The only way you can loose is to make a mistake. If both players play the round correctly then it will always be a round. I think they used this in the movie “War Games” to force the rouge AI into a to draw or something like that.
[quote post=”1526″]now that’s odd.. I just got an email to notify me of a comment that is now above mine..[/quote]
It was in the moderation queue for some reason and I just approved it. That’s probably why.
[quote post=”1526″]Also, if you know how to do this thing in old versions of Excel I think I have an old Office ‘97 disc around somewhere, could be interesting[/quote]
Check the site linked by Fr3d – it might be listed there.
Found it:
1. On a new Worksheet, Press F5
2. Type X97:L97 and hit enter
3. Press the tab key
4. Hold Ctrl-Shift
5. Click on the Chart Wizard toolbar button
6. Use mouse to fly around – Right button forward/ Left button reverse
N.B. You need to have direct draw installed for this egg. If you don’t, you’ll get the message: “This would be much more interesting if you were running with DirectDraw. But you’re not, so this will have to suffice”, and the credits will appear.
Now let’s see if I can be bothered to try it…
(probably not)