General Hardware Information

[Greg]

Does anyone know a good website that has
generic hardware info for all the basic stuff
(video,keyboard,mouse etc) that tells you what
ports to read or write to do different things?

[J. Weeks]

>On 2002-05-26 10:38:56, Greg wrote:
>Does anyone know a good website that has
>generic hardware info for all the basic stuff
>(video,keyboard,mouse etc) that tells you what
>ports to read or write to do different things?

Check out www.beyondlogic.org, I believe it's got
a lot of info about that kinda stuff.

The keyboard and mouse are pretty easy, so you can
probably just take a look at some source from
existing OS's to get that stuff down (or search
some old DOS programming sites for stuff like
mouse ISR, keyboard ISR, etc).

Your best bet, in my opinion, would be one of the
following books:

The Undocumented PC: A Programmer's Guide to I/O, CPUs, and Fixed Memory Areas (2nd Edition)
by Frank Van Gilluwe
Addison Wesley Professional; ISBN: 0201479508
1136 pages

The Indispensable PC Hardware Book: Your Hardware Questions Answered (3rd Edition)
by Hans-Peter Messmer
Addison-Wesley Pub Co; ISBN: 0201403994
1408 pages

I haven't read either, but I've heard nothing but
good things about both (check Amazon.com for more
info).

Jeff

[Guest]

All good choices. Oh, BTW, Messemer's book is now
in it's fourth edition, if you can find it.

I'd also suggest _PC PhD_ by Myke Predko
(ISBN 0-07-134186-2). It's rather more difficult
to follow than Messemer's book in places, but the
section "Operating Systemless Disk Operations",
which covers writing a boot loader and loading a
small binary file from disk, makes it all worth
the trouble.

More about the book can be found at
http://www.myke.com/pc-phd.htm

[Hillbillie]

>Oh, BTW, Messemer's book is now
in it's fourth edition, if you can find it.<

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... 16-5955026

[Greg]

Thanks for the help guys:-)