Forgive my ignorance....
Has anyone actually made any progress so far on actually writing a bios which boots an OS?
I was also wondering if anyone has noticed the way that old and some current Compaq machines BIOS' work. They seem to have a very simple bios on ROM which is capable of autodetecting RAM, processor, hdd, fdd etc. but has no interface, to set the thing up you need the floppy or special partition on the harddrive. Although from a maintenance point of view I don't like this it did mean that they were able to make a very comprehensive setup program with full built-in diagnostics etc. Which ultimately was user friendly since Compaq used Windows 3.1 as the BIOS set-up OS! No reason why we couldn't use a nice 'pretty' VGA setup util that sits on the harddrive, or a text one that runs from Floppy.
I appreciate that this isn't an ideal solution, but I've become very frustrated with BIOS' that simply don't have the right options for no good reason like, no option to boot A,ZIP/LS,SCSI,IDE-0 or the like.
As I understand it we are looking for a modular system that can be compiled, ultimately for any motherboard, is this correct?
Just some Ideas, Regards
Joel Mansford
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