Hello

[Asbjoernsen at atntr.telemax.no]

> > > I also think that providing legacy OS support though loading a
> > > traditional BIOS from disk is the way to go.
> >
> > Yes. fully true.
> 
> Well, I'm not too sure about that. It would require a Windows user to store
> some BIOS file on disk, which would be either on a Windows partition, where it
> could be accidentally deleted, on a special partition, which would require a
> partition entry, or outside any partitions, where it would be hard to protect
> the file from fdisk.
> 
> Linking wrapper functions is the better way IMHO, since it would not require
> too much memory and let us run OpenBIOS in the background of these OSs.
Yes, but in the early stages of development, it would be nice to have a working
biosloader flashed on the chip, and then test new versions by loading them from
disk. If we have a legacy bios loadable on disk, we can use that as a fallback
then thing goes wrong. This way we could also get started making some code. I
don't know how much work this would take, but a simple thing that gets the first
128k from a floppy and then boots that would be a good start, wouldn't it? Then
the first bootable things don't have to be complete, it could just write out
some debugging info to the console, and then you boot back into the award or
whatever bios from your rescue floppy to continue developing... Just a thought.

Karl Erik Asbjornsen
karlea at samfundet.ntnu.no