28 Mar
2008
28 Mar
'08
3:15 a.m.
Rumor has it that Jim Leonard may have mentioned these words:
Eric Smith wrote:
But you wouldn't have to *jump* into the middle of a bios for wanting stuff
in the right place - back in them thar daze, just peeking for a value
(screen size / format / other things I can't begin to fathom as I don't
know PeeSee's for diddle ;-) could cause programs to break... heck, even
just poking into video memory was a widespread tactic to increase speed,
and if Compaq could make their cleanroom BIOS as compatible as possible -
trying to look ahead to squish bugs that may or may not exist (gosh, what
if BG took that tactic with Vista nowadays??? ;-)
Well, it must've worked even partway - Compaq was an awfully big company at
one time... ;-)
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
zmerch at 30below.com
Hi! I am a .signature virus. Copy me into your .signature to join in!
Suppose you're trying to market a PC clone.
How successful will you be
if some piece of popular software for the PC won't run on your clone,
because that software depends on direct calls into the ROM, or direct
access to tables in the ROM (e.g., the character generator)? Back in
those days, *lots* of software did wacky things like that.
Yes, but *why*? I am getting to be what I consider a pretty decent
assembler programmer, specifically on the 5150/5160, and I honestly can't
see *why* I would *ever* want to specifically jump directly into the
middle of the BIOS. I *call* BIOS routines, obviously, but what possible
benefit or purpose could there be to jumping directly into ROM?