Playing Tetris On An Oscilloscope

Have engineers stopped putting Easter eggs into technology lately? It’s always been a fun way to connect with your more advanced customer base (i.e. hackers) — anyway, here’s a great Easter egg you can find on the Hewlett Packard 54600B Oscilloscop — Tetris!

[RaffttaM] discovered this trick when a coworker let him know that one of the oscilloscopes in the lab had the hidden feature. A little fiddling later and a game of Tetris was revealed. If you press the Print/Utility button on the 54600B oscilloscope, followed by pressing the second and third button below the screen at the same time, you can launch the game!

Another cool embedded Easter egg is in the Game Boy Printer — If you hold the feed button during power up it spits out a Mario themed image! One of our readers even managed to hack the printer to show the Hack a Day Logo instead!

Do you know of any more modern tech with cool (and sneaky!) Easter eggs? Let us know by sending in a tip!

[Thanks Gregory!]

13 thoughts on “Playing Tetris On An Oscilloscope

  1. Just checked on the 54645D. Instead of Tetris, it plays Centipede. If you press the third and fourth buttons, it displays dot art of what appears to be a badger and lists out what appear to be the devs.

    1. Mine also plays Centipede. And I’m quite astonished about the level of detail, the port is VERY close to the arcade original when it comes to enemy behavior and scoring (and it even keeps high scores in NVRAM). These software designers must have been incredibly bored.
      And yes, mine does the badger, too. You can even still use it when it’s finished drawing.

  2. The on-chip boot rom in an SoC from a former employer of mine would spit out the names of the design and validation team if you sent the right string down the serial port in bootloader mode. Even among design guys there aren’t a lot of people that can say they have their names permanently etched in commercially sold silicon.

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