On Wed, 11 Mar 1998, David Woodhouse wrote:
cpa@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
...
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.
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.
-- "Love the dolphins," she advised him. "Write by W.A.S.T.E.."
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