TinyBIOS – A minimalist open-source BIOS project for fun

Re:TinyBIOS – A minimalist open-source BIOS project for fun by hakfoo on Saturday November 19, 2022 @09:01PM (#33677314)

There are at least three "real" 8086 BIOSes-- "real" as in they can work on actual hardware rather than just emulators-- available in source form, which might be worth examining.

https://www.phatcode.net/downloads.php?id=101 -- this is a respin of code that apparently originated in the 1980s in sketchy Taiwanese clones, so I think some of the docs are reverse engineered

http://glabios.org/ is an all-new-still-under-development project, but it works well enough for my hobby usage.

https://github.com/skiselev/8088_bios These are more targeted towards some specific hardware projects (Xi8088/Micro8088)

Obviously, being for a simple 8086 mrans they don't have some of the complex chipset config used in a modern PC, and even stuff like "hard disc support" is outsourced (for that, you might consider stuff like the XT-IDE Universal BIOS)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:TinyBIOS – A minimalist open-source BIOS project for fun by snvzz on Saturday November 19, 2022 @09:07PM (#33677350)

Glabios is GPL3, although unfortunately based upon MASM (non-free and quite old-fashioned assembler).

The other two are sketchy and no license (i.e. unusable), respectively.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:TinyBIOS – A minimalist open-source BIOS project for fun by tssva on Sunday November 20, 2022 @02:10AM (#33678987)

Sergey's XT BIOS does have a license. It is GPL3. There is no license file in the repo but each source file contains the copyright and license information.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:TinyBIOS – A minimalist open-source BIOS project for fun by snvzz on Sunday November 20, 2022 @05:15AM (#33679787)

I see. GPL-3. And it uses NASM, so I'm also happy about it.

I guess I now have a large amount of code to read. Oh well.

[ Parent | on HN ]