27 Mar
2008
27 Mar
'08
10:19 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
Actually, a lot of people spent a lot of time
reverse-engineering the
IBM BIOS. You really don't get a sense of this until you realize
that Phoenix not only made sure that the functionality of the BIOS
routines was the same, but that the routines themselves were located
at the same place in memory.
Having them in the same place in memory seems like a big waste of time.
I can't think of a single instance in which knowing where the routines
are located in memory can help me write a faster or smaller program.
If the routines do the same thing, and are at the same place in ROM, how
different enough (to avoid copyright) from the originals could they be?
It's been a while since I looked at the tech ref listings but they
didn't seem all that horribly written (I know others will disagree, I
myself found a bug in the cursor handling in my 5160 ROM, but that's not
the point -- the point is that they weren't SO terrible that they could
be significantly improved or made smaller)...
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
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A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/