28 Feb
2013
28 Feb
'13
4:21 p.m.
On Feb 28, 2013, at 3:45 PM, Chris Tofu wrote:
But the burning question is could you fiddle with the extension rom code and use it as a
loadable device driver? After all you could transfer rom BASIC to a disk file and run it
that way.
Probably not; extension ROMs usually provide services to the BIOS (or
hook interrupts used by the BIOS and run in place of the BIOS
routines) while DOS drivers tend to provide services directly to DOS.
It's akin to the difference between a driver and an application (but
obviously not exactly the same).
Whether you could run a script from autoexec.bat or config.sys to
execute expansion ROM code after DOS boot is another question, but
I have no idea how well that would work after the BIOS has already
handed over control to the OS (I suspect not so well, but I don't
know for sure). You can certainly try jumping to the code location
in DEBUG or the like.
- Dave