[mycatisblack]

Very cool! I have to ask: what would the total size be if the package included the bios functions?

Also: what could be done if the size limit were 8kbyte like the mask-rom bios days?

Thanks for pointing me towards the bosh emulator.

[shikaan]

Hey, thanks for taking a look!

On the former, I have no idea how to estimate BIOS functions size. Maybe I could just peek into an image and get a sense for it...

On the latter, with a 16x increase in available space, I guess I would do a much more thorough work in putting guardrails in place.

The API currently comes with a couple of traps (e.g., file names can be duplicated, processes are cooperative, all file operations perform disk I/O...) and it essentially requires guest applications to know about BIOS services in order to function.

Another sticky point I wish I had the space to address better are calling conventions, which I had to get rid of almost immediately to save on instructions.

> Thanks for pointing me towards the bosh emulator.

You're welcome! Bochs is such a nice tool which I discovered only for this project as well. It was a no-brainer, since I got no way to debug 16-bit assembly from QEMU (unless you go off and fork it[1])

[1]: https://gist.github.com/Theldus/4e1efc07ec13fb84fa10c2f3d054...

[userbinator]

what would the total size be if the package included the bios functions?

Probably a few dozen to over a hundred KB, maybe even over a MB, depending on the era of machine and what it has installed; e.g. the GPU option ROM would be included if you use int 10h, int 13h might be hooked by a disk adapter, and if you use int 16h to read from a USB keyboard, that'll go through the BIOS' USB stack which normally includes some code in SMM too.