Progress?

[Joe'l' Mansford]

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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              Operating System.  '98 is the work of the Devil
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