Awesome

Bare Metal Tetris

Tetris for x86.

There is an improved version, in NASM, called Tetrasm.

Features

• Color text display
• PC speaker sound effects
• Help screen
• Tetrimino preview
• Tetrimino ghost
• Soft & hard drop
• Pause
• Score and levels
• Increasing difficulty
• Tetrimino statistics

Technical Overview

Bare Metal Tetris does not use processor interrupts, since initializing and using them seemed too complex for a single-file Tetris game. Instead, it uses a combination of an infinite loop, CPU tick counting, and the real-time clock (RTC) to achieve timing.

The timing calibration function is called on every iteration of the main loop. This function checks the RTC to determine if a second has passed since the last calibration. If one has, the number of CPU ticks since boot is retrieved using the rdtsc instruction, and the number of ticks elapsed in the last second is calculated. This is then divided and set as the tpms, or "ticks per millisecond" value. Timing functions then use this value, along with the same rdtsc instruction, to determine if a number of milliseconds have elapsed since a previous call. These timing values can be seen in the debug screen, toggled using D.

In order to properly calibrate the tpms before the game starts, the title screen is shown for at least one second. That is, the RTC second value must change twice before the timing is properly calibrated and the game can start.

The main loop also checks for keyboard input by polling on each iteration, and takes care of updating game state and redrawing the screen if any state has changed.

Building

make

Requires the NASM assembler, a C compiler and a linker.

The build tries to use an i386-elf target GCC cross-compiler by default. To change the target tuple, pass a TARGET value to make. On x86 or x86_64 systems that already target ELF, such as Linux, the system compiler can be used by passing CC=gcc LD=ld to make.

The build output is a multiboot ELF file tetris.elf.

Binaries

Binary ELF files and ISO images can be found on the releases page.

Running

QEMU

make qemu

The multiboot ELF file can be booted directly by the QEMU emulator.

ISO

make tetris.iso

A bootable ISO can be created using GRUB's stage2_eltorito (included in this repository) to boot the multiboot ELF file.

genisoimage is used to crate the ISO file. On systems without genisoimage, mkisofs from the cdrtools package can be used instead by passing GENISOIMAGE=mkisofs to make.

The resulting tetris.iso file can then be booted with the QEMU emulator using make qemu-iso, attached to a virtual machine as a CD drive, or burned to a CD and booted on real hardware.

License

Copyright © 2013–2014, Curtis McEnroe programble@gmail.com

Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.