Saturday, September 13, 2014

Bochs - A PC Emulator

Bochs is a PC emulator. What is my expectation to Bochs? I want to write a simplest BIOS and burn it in the emulator without breaking my real PC. I'm too excited to read Bochs document. Let's download it, run it, and try to change the default BIOS of the emulator.

Here is the Bochs official web page.
http://bochs.sourceforge.net/

Please download Bochs-2.6.6.exe in the web page in your Windows environment and install it. Then, you can find Bochs 2.6.6 in your Windows start menu.


Just click Bochs 2.6.6 icon to start the PC emulator. You can see a window and a dialog.



No doubt, just click the Start button in the dialog to turn on the PC. I'll explain the Load button later. You can see another window that displays as a monitor of the PC. Another dialog is also popped up because a fatal error, no-bootable-device, occurs.


We can see a default BIOS, Bochs BIOS - build: 08/02/13, in the window. The question is how to replace the default BIOS? Do you remember the Load button? If you click it, a dialog, Load Bochs Config File, displays. It loads a *.bxrc file that you specify. You should be interested in the file. Please search them.

C:\Program Files\Bochs-2.6.6>dir *.bxrc /s
Directory of C:\Program Files\Bochs-2.6.6\dlxlinux
2014/09/13  ?? 10:08             1,533 bochsrc.bxrc

You can find the bochsrc.bxrc. Please open it and search BIOS or rom keyword.

# filename of ROM images
romimage: file=../BIOS-bochs-latest
vgaromimage: file=../VGABIOS-lgpl-latest

You can change the romimage config to specify your BIOS.

Another way is to run the following command in the prompt.
C:\Program Files\Bochs-2.6.6>bochs -f dlxlinux\bochsrc.bxrc -q

What does the command mean? Please see the help text by running "bochs -h".
C:\Program Files\Bochs-2.6.6>bochs -h

The below page shows you how to write the simplest BIOS and burn it with Bochs.

http://countchu.blogspot.tw/2014/10/write-your-half-bios.html

-Count






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