pavel(a)elf.ucw.cz said:
> Hmm. Did someone _really_ start? Is there someone who actually
> compiled that Bochs BIOS? Where to download complete package
> (including bcc, because it is not really common).
I'm not sure about _compiling_ the Bochs BIOS, but Dave Cinege tried the
precompiled version that comes with the Bochs source, and it did nothing
visibly useful.
Bcc is part of the Dev86 package, which can be found at
http://poboxes.com/rdebath
I'll put a copy of the latest version in /pub/openbios on my machine, too.
As for _really_ starting on the code, I doubt that anyone's made much of a
start. I'm itching to do some, but my Director of Studies will slaughter me if
I so much as look at anything but "An implementation of RSVP on Nemesis"
( http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/pegasus/nemesis.html )
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>The MDA cards require absolutely no setup. They display text from the
moment
>the power goes on. I suspect older [CEV]GA cards will be similar.
Not correct, you need to initialize the 6845 CRTC. Pardon the grotty
formatting.
;
; Init Hercules card
;
cld
mov al,#$21 ;disable video
mov dx,#$03b8
out dx,al
mov si,#herctext ;set text mode
mov bl,#0
mov dx,#$03b4
hercloop mov al,bl
out dx,al
inc dx
cs: lods.b
out dx,al
dec dx
inc bx
cmp bl,#16
jb hercloop
mov al,#$29 ;enable video
mov dx,#$3b8
out dx,al
mov ax,#$b000 ;clear screen
mov es,ax
mov ax,#vidfill
mov cx,#2000
mov di,#0
rep stos
jmp hercend
;
; Hercules text mode settings
;
herctext B $61,$50,$52,$0F,$19,$06,$19,$19 ; mode 7
B $02,$0D,$0B,$0C,$00,$00,$00,$00
hercend
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> > Ditch your fancy new SVGA cards, install an old MDA card, and
> > mov ax,b800h
> > mov ds,ax
> > ...
>
> IIRC, the segment base for MDA is 0xb000, not 0xb800 (CGA), but, as
> with you, it's been a while.
I stand corrected. I hereby declare myself to be this week's Official Mr. F^&*
All Good, for failing even to manage a six-line asm program <D:-(
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oxymoron(a)waste.org said:
> It would be nearly as easy to generate output on the serial port
> using polled IO. Presumably all the developers have at least a serial
> port and a second machine that they're not ready to kill their BIOS
> on. I've recently written a small library of assembly functions to do
> this, include register and memory dump routines and a printf-like
> varargs function for debugging the bootloader of an embedded
> operating system I'm writing. The routines are currently written for
> MASM - if anyone would like them, I can make them available.
Sounds good. Could you mail them to me, and I'll put them up for FTP with the
rest of the stuff.
Support for reblowing the flash from a serial port, rather than from a floppy,
is going to be a damn sight easier to put together, so I suggest that we do
that in the first instance, too.
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> It's alive. I signed up recently trying to find out if I can help. Get an
> idea of the level of development. But like you said there has been no
> traffic (I even forgot I signed up).
>
> Who can I contact to find out if I can do some work on the OpenBIOS?
I think the discussions of general ideas fizzled out, and the last we heard,
people were off to play with the Bochs BIOS source, in an attempt to get it to
work at least a little bit on a real computer.
Until then, we can still put together a development system, binary module
spec., and a list of modules to be provided.
At some point in the dim and distant past, I and a few other people posted
lists of the basic support that we're going to require in order to boot a
Linux kernel.
Unless you have access to the necessary hardware for making replacement PROMS,
assume that someone will get the basic chipset init working, pick something
else, and implement it.
INT 15h extended memory services might be a simple place to start, and should
be quite simple to test from DOS.
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cpa(a)hopper.unh.edu said:
> What would it take just to write a Hello World program?
Ditch your fancy new SVGA cards, install an old MDA card, and
mov ax,b800h
mov ds,ax
mov ax,'eH'
mov [0],ax
mov ax,'ll'
mov [2],ax
...
OK, I'm a bit rusty, but you get the idea.
The MDA cards require absolutely no setup. They display text from the moment
the power goes on. I suspect older [CEV]GA cards will be similar.
> I think
> seeing this code would give people something of a starting place. Do
> we just load the Video BIOS up and use it to write a string to the
> screen and halt, or can/should we do it without the Video BIOS?
Until we've set up enough to support the card's Video BIOS, we'd better do it
on our own. Most new cards will probably require at least the PCI BIOS
functions to have been implemented first.
> From there you can add support to initialize your chipsets functions.
> BTW, do we have anybody here with a SMP machine? Those do require more
> to initialize, and we will eventually want to make sure that works.
Yep. I've got such a beast. I'm not playing until May, when my Finals are
over, but after that I'll be working on it. You'd be surprised at just how
little the SMP Tyan BIOS manages to do for itself - that's half the reason I
wanted us to write our own in the first place.
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Since everybody is wondering if the list is alive, I'll post something
I've been thinking about...
What would it take just to write a Hello World program? I think seeing
this code would give people something of a starting place. Do we just load
the Video BIOS up and use it to write a string to the screen and halt, or
can/should we do it without the Video BIOS?
>From there you can add support to initialize your chipsets functions.
BTW, do we have anybody here with a SMP machine? Those do require more to
initialize, and we will eventually want to make sure that works.
--
Chris Arguin | "...All we had were Zeros and Ones -- And
Chris.Arguin(a)unh.edu | sometimes we didn't even have Ones."
+--------------+ - Dilbert, by Scott Adams
http://leonardo.sr.unh.edu/arguin/home.html |
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cpa(a)hopper.unh.edu said:
> What would it take just to write a Hello World program?
Ditch your fancy new SVGA cards, install an old MDA card, and
mov ax,b800h
mov ds,ax
mov ax,'eH'
mov [0],ax
mov ax,'ll'
mov [2],ax
...
OK, I'm a bit rusty, but you get the idea.
IIRC, the segment base for MDA is 0xb000, not 0xb800 (CGA), but, as
with you, it's been a while.
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danh(a)firstwest.com said:
> Am I able to use C, or is this strictly asm? Of course some asm will
> be involved but C makes the development faster.
Do what you like. I don't think it's particularly reasonable to expect the
whole thing to be written in asm.
Also, I reckon that just about any compiler can generate better asm than I can.
steve(a)icarus.icarus.com said:
> Doing without a compiler only makes sense for writing a few tricky
> functions or impressing women.
I'm inclined to agree. Glance at http://dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk/devload/ for
evidence to back this up. It was fun, but I wouldn't want to do it again.
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Hello all,
I've been lurking on the mailing list for about a week now and I'd like
to say hi. I have an interest in Bios code because I've written the
Bios for our Flashlite series of controllers and I'm interested in
building an embedded Linux machine.
As far as contributions go, I can't give you my code, but I do have the
source to a PC/XT Bios, written in Masm, that was freely circulated a
few years ago. It does work, I've burned it into eproms and booted from
it and I've used just a little code from it. It's not very pretty, but
if there is any demand, I'll post it for downloading.
Concerning Microsoft OS's and Bios, at least in the case of Win95, I
have it on pretty good authority that the OS uses *none* of the Bios
functions. This is documented in "Unauthorized Windows 95" and confirmed
by the VP of engineering at Award Software. What I got from my
discussions with him is that the current microsoft philosophy is for the
Bios to initialize the hardware and sorta give the os clues as to what's
out there and nothing more.
Whether this is relevent to your efforts is not real clear yet as I
haven't been on the list very long.
In any case, I'll be lurking, and if I can be of any help, let me know.
Regards,
Jim
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