One of the most popular OS built-in games is no doubt Pinball, known by its full name 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet. It started out as Full Tilt! Pinball, developed by Cinematronics and published by Maxis. It offered 3 tables, and one of them, Space Cadet, was licensed to Microsoft to be included […]
At the end of last year, a copy of 86-DOS 0.11 for the Cromemco 4FDC controller surfaced. It is the earliest released version of 86-DOS, the earliest operating system for the x86 architecture. Having done some legacy work dealing with real mode x86 before, I thought I could maybe challenge myself and build a copy […]
Update This port is now outdated. The latest ports of 86-DOS to the IBM PC are on GitHub and binaries may be downloaded from there too. This is not a writeup, the port is still WIP. I’m just dumping whatever I’ve done here for people to see, because xmas and new year holidays are now […]
I recently completed a C programming course at university. It was fun :). I guess the most interesting part was stealing the assignment solutions. Okay, just to be clear, I didn’t cheat. Basically, we had programming assignments, and the lecturers provided compiled assignment solutions as demos for us to test our implementations against. When I […]
2024 Edit Following the discovery of other versions of 86-DOS and newer efforts, this port is now outdated. The latest ports of 86-DOS to the IBM PC are on GitHub and binaries may be downloaded from there too. Nonetheless, this post is still worth reading because it forms the basis of my newer ports and […]
I wanted to get familiar with the IBM PC INT 1xH BIOS interrupts and explore how they’re actually used in practice, all in preparation for a challenge project. Reverse engineering the BIOS of PC-DOS seemed like the perfect exercise – the DOS BIOS handles all input and output for the DOS kernel and applications, so […]
The welcoming post for my blog.