Writing my own BIOS

Question

I\'m not crazy, just reinventing the wheel :D
I wrote boot-loaders, mouse & keyboard mini-drivers, mini OS and so on.

I\'m always trying to avoid DOS inter

Answer 1

FWIW Modbin is a DOS program that as the name suggests MODifies BIN images especially for the purpose of both simple qnd fairly extreme changes to existing BIOS code.

If you can obtain an old mobo (many are thrown away still working) I would encourage you to play around with the BIOS. It's informative and fun, if one is so inclined and you seem to be :) There was a time that I downloaded BIOS images from mobos that had the same or similar enough chipsets though made by a different manufacturer...sometimes to considerable advantage including such simple ones as continuing to get BIOS updates after the original mobo manufacturer dropped the ball or went belly up, but also features and performance oriented options and alterations.

This led to "HOT Flashing" which is pulling up a socketed BIOS chip so that the pins just barely made contact and once booted up, pulling that one and substituting a bad one (often one I had fuxored) while still running and flashing it employing the cached BIOS feature that kept the system active. Fun stuff for those of us of the geek persuasion and gave me the confidence to write device drivers for OS/2