3 Oct
2001
3 Oct
'01
12:15 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Tony Duell once stated:
I wish more manufacturers would put a program in the boot ROM that allows
reading and writing to memory, running (machine code) programs and
preferably also reading/writing I/O ports (if they're not memory mapped).
It makes debugging the machine a lot easier if it can't boot a disk (or
if you don't have a bootable disk for the machine, at least you can do
something with it.
Tiny (or otherwise) BASIC allows one to do this. So does Forth. Or just a
little machine code monitor. With ROM space being so cheap these days
you'd have thought they could find room for something like this...
Not enough return on investment for that to be done by the BIOS writers or
the PC manufacturers---why waste time on a feature that *may* get used by
less than 1% of 1% of the users?
On the other hand, why not make an ISA card with your own ROM monitor?
Plug it into a PC, during POST, the BIOS will see the extention ROM and
allow it to hook into the vector table, so you could hook INT 18h on any PC
with this board.
-spc (I think you have enough equipment to do that, right?)