Write Your Half BIOS

What is BIOS? BIOS is shorten from Basic Input Output System. Don't doubt it. That is really meaning of BIOS. Someone says that the purpose of BIOS is to boot OS. I don't think so. OS should be optional. What is Input? The keyboard and mouse are input devices. What is Output? The monitor and port 80 are output devices. If you write a program that enables input and output devices and your program is performed by CPU at reset vector, your program is BIOS.

I'm glad to see the page has the same idea of writing your BIOS. The page was written by Harrison Hsieh who is my former colleague.
http://biosengineer.blogspot.tw/2007/12/x86-bios4.html

My page just describes how to write a Half BIOS, a program that is performed by CPU at reset vector but it doesn't enable input and output devices. I also demonstrate how to run the Half BIOS with Bochs.

The following are source code of Half BIOS.

HalfBios.asm

Please follow the steps to build it by MASM and run it with Bochs.

Step 1. Build it with MASM611 or above.

> masm HalfBios.asm

The HalfBios.obj is generated.

Step 2. Update bochsrc.bxrc to change romimage file to HalfBios.bin

# romimage: file=../BIOS-bochs-latest
romimage: file=../HalfBios.bin

Step 3. Manually generate HalfBios.bin

> copy BIOS-bochs-latest HalfBios.bin

Please manually copy the 32 bytes with the signature "########" from HalfBios.obj to the offset 1FFE0h in HalfBios.bin. The content of 32 bytes is the program of Half BIOS.

Please make sure that there are EB F3 machine code at the offset 1FFF0h where is reset vector.

Step 4. Run Half BIOS with Bochs in debug mode.

C:\Program Files\Bochs-2.6.6\dlxlinux>..\bochsdbg.exe -f bochsrc.bxrc

We see that CPU performs the Half BIOS at the reset vector, f000:fff0, and then jump POST entry point.

-Count