Hi,
I wrote the Pong game. It was originally part of an exercise we'd give to interview candidates, actually. The Pong VM would boot up, and the interviewee's job was to write a program that played the Pong game by simulating mouse/keyboard input and hooking into the VM's graphics device. After that, we ported it to the "Metalkit" toy OS as a simple (but fun) example of how to do 2D graphics in a VM. This was part of a small open source toolkit we released which shows OS developers how to write drivers for our graphics device:
http://vmware-svga.sourceforge.net/
Including the Pong test in the VMX was done purely for fun, as an easter egg. There actually isn't a specific check for zero-byte floppy images. The floppy device returns "undefined" data if you read past the end of the file. It just so happens that this data can be interpreted as a bootable floppy with a little game on it :smileyhappy:
I'm sorry if this caused any alarm- I wasn't aware of the ping-pong virus. After reading the description of that virus on Wikipedia, though, I don't see how this Pong game could be confused with that virus. This one is obviously playable, and uses VM-specific features like the absolute pointing device. The virus was just a bouncing ball and nothing else.
I can also explain why this version is slightly different from the open source version: they're both based on the same code, but I manually stripped the built-in version down so the binary was as small as possible. This included removing some unused library code, and I think I ended up using an older version of the Metalkit bootloader. The whole thing only adds about 5 kilobytes to the VMX. And hey, if you knew how much time and space we waste on much less entertaining features, you wouldn't complain :smileywink:
--Micah