Jan 25, 2025 18:00:00

'UEFI NYAN 80x25' is now available, porting the Nyan Cat to UEFI

UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is an interface that controls the CPU, memory, etc. to operate correctly when the PC is started up, before the OS starts running. ' UEFI NYAN 80x25 ', which ports Nyan Cat to this UEFI, has been released.

GitHub - diekmann/uefi_nyan_80x25: Porting Nyan cat to UEFI. In Rust 🦀. Writeup ✍️
https://github.com/diekmann/uefi_nyan_80x25

How Nyan Cat Was Ported To UEFI | Hackaday
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/13/how-nyan-cat-was-ported-to-uefi/

'Nyan Cat' is the animated video below, which uses a cover of the song ' Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya! ' released on Nico Nico Douga in 2010, performed by Momone Momo from the voice synthesis software ' UTAU .' It was released in 2011 and became popular, becoming an internet meme.

Nyan Cat! [Official] - YouTube


UEFI NYAN 80x25 is a program that allows you to run Nyan Cat as a UEFI application. Developer Cornelius Diekmann explains how he developed it: 'After learning Rust and being able to output 'Hello World', I developed the EFI Simple Text Output Protocol , which outputs strings in UEFI apps, and implemented it by converting the Nyan Cat GIF animation into text.'

Specifically, I scaled the Nyan Cat GIF animation down to 40x25 pixels and exported the first frame to an HTML table format in GIMP.

They then ran a Python script to parse and map each color to a corresponding URFI color constant, then generated Rust code to convert the Nyan Cat into a text-based format that can be displayed in UEFI environments.

When you install UEFI NYAN 80x25, 'nyan' is added to the UEFI Boot menu.

Below is the actual UEFI NYAN 80x25 running. Since it is text-based, no music will play.

'Support for Windows 10 is ending? Use Nyan Cat as your new OS. Is Linux too complicated? Use Nyan Cat as your new OS. Is BSD too esoteric? Use Nyan Cat as your new OS. Does macOS not run natively on ThinkPads? Use Nyan Cat as your new OS,' Diekmann said.