UserEvaluationForIneptness

Silly toy project made to learn about EDK II

It throws you a simple math question — the sum of two random numbers.

Get it wrong, and you'll be mocked and the system shuts down.

Get it right, and the boot continues like nothing ever happened.

Demo videos

Running on QEMU

demo_qemu.mp4

Running on Thinkpad X270

demo_thinkpad.mp4

Running

Real Hardware

1. Get the EFI Application

• Download UserEvaluationForIneptness.efi from releases
• Or build from source

2. Copy EFI Application and phrases file to ESP

ESP is typically mounted at /boot or /efi reference

Example phrases.txt are provided in repo root

# Create directory structure
sudo mkdir /boot/EFI/UEFIGame

# Copy the application
sudo cp UserEvaluationForIneptness.efi /boot/EFI/UEFIGame/

# Optional: Copy phrases file (must be UTF-16)
sudo cp phrases.txt /boot/EFI/UEFIGame/

3. Create EFI boot entry

Easiest way is to use efibootmgr

sudo efibootmgr --create --disk /dev/nvme0n1 --part 1 \ 
    --loader '\EFI\UEFIGame\UserEvaluationForIneptness.efi' \
    --label "UEFIGame"

Adjust --disk and --part to match your system

4. Reboot and run

Restart your system and enter the UEFI Setup (formerly known as BIOS), look for the boot options section and select the EFI entry you just created

QEMU + OVFM

1. Install Dependencies

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S qemu edk2-ovmf
# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install qemu-system-x86 ovmf
# Fedora
sudo dnf install qemu edk2-ovmf

2. Prepare Virtual FAT Filesystem

Qemu can emulate a virtual drive with a FAT filesystem. It works by prepending fat: to a directory name. reference

# Create directory structure
mkdir -p uefi_disk/EFI/UEFIGame

3. Copy EFI Application and phrases file

Get UserEvaluationForIneptness.efi either from the release section or build it yourself and copy it on the virtual disk

Example phrases.txt are provided in repo root

# Copy the application
cp UserEvaluationForIneptness.efi uefi_disk/EFI/Boot/BOOTX64.efi

# Optional: Copy phrases file (must be UTF-16)
cp phrases.txt uefi_disk/EFI/UEFIGame/

4. Launch QEMU

qemu-system-x86_64 \
    -drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly=on,file=/usr/share/edk2/x64/OVMF_CODE.4m.fd \
    -drive file=fat:rw:./uefi_disk,format=raw,if=virtio \
    -cpu qemu64,+rdrand

Notes:

• Replace OVMF path if needed (common alternatives: /usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE.fd)
• The BOOTX64.EFI filename is required for automatic UEFI boot

Phrases file

How it works

The game will choose a random phrase (Reservoir Sampling) from this file as response if the user fails the question. If the file is not available or something crashed the game falls back to a default phrase.

Format

Nothing fancy, check the example phrases.txt provided

• file must be UTF-16
• phrases can be multiline
• phrases are separated by 1 empty line (\n\n)

Building

1. Environment Setup

Follow the instructions to get a working EDK II build environment

All following commands should be run inside the edk2 directory

2. Clone

Clone this repo as UefiGamePkg

git clone https://github.com/mycroftsnm/UEFIGame.git UefiGamePkg       

3. Build

Build command example

build -p UefiGamePkg/UefiGamePkg.dsc -a X64 -t GCC5 -b DEBUG -m UefiGamePkg/UserEvaluationForIneptness.inf  

The -m part is useful to avoid building all MdeModulePkg modules.

This will generate a (hopefully) working efi binary at Build/UefiGame/DEBUG_GCC5/X64/UefiGamePkg/UserEvaluationForIneptness/OUTPUT/UserEvaluationForIneptness.efi