512-byte OS Contest

[Troy Martin]

El-Torito is 2048 bytes, you epic fail.

It is 2 KB, is it not?

[Jabus]

How long do we have before the poll is checked and the date chosen?

[quok]

El-Torito is 2048 bytes, you epic fail.

It is 2 KB, is it not?

El-Torito is however much you tell BIOS to boot for you. In practice, most El Torito loaders limit themselves to 2048 bytes due to BIOS bugs with loading more than that. 2048 bytes is the size of a sector on a CD, remember.

However, that's not to say that it HAS to be 2048 bytes. It's certainly possible to use only 512 bytes.

So, I don't "epic fail" for two reasons. I didn't go over your silly 512 byte limit, and I said I wasn't going to actually submit it.

Edit: Clarifying here, I'm talking about the no-emulation loaders.

[Brynet-Inc]

What an entirely pointless topic..

@Troy, are you by any chance wearing a chapeau on your gluteus maximus?

[quok]

Double post here... but don't I get any points for using an oddball interpreted language that runs in its own virtual machine?

[Troy Martin]

Brynet: Define pointless. Maybe you're just not the kind who likes these things.

Quok: I think that does deserve points That's probably the first time I've heard of that in a boot sector! Now you should've made the bootsector a FALSE interpreter, that would be a hell of an entry.

And the winning date is January 6th.

[inflater]

@brynet: What an entirely pointless post from you.

Seriously now. Feb 7th?! What the hell do you want to put in 512 bytes to reserve a month for it? Let's say the deadline is on fourth of January and that's it... the winter holidays for me are ending at 8 Jan, too. For example I'm coding a DOS MZ-EXE loader in 512 bytes and it's very hard make it fit into the single sector...

Once and for all: deadline on 4. January and that's it. No more code than 512 bytes, no any bootloaders like GRUB, bootr01 and any else. Who doesn't agree with this, don't join.

[Brynet-Inc]

Brynet: Define pointless. Maybe you're just not the kind who likes these things.

EDIT: Removed 2015: Imageshack replaced all links with spam.

[Troy Martin]

Did you just excrete a hat in my topic? Touche.

[Troy Martin]

Once and for all: deadline on 4. January and that's it. No more code than 512 bytes, no any bootloaders like GRUB, bootr01 and any else. Who doesn't agree with this, don't join.

Thank you.

Now I made it 7 since there were a few who said "mid-January" and I respect that. But it shouldn't take you until February to write 512 bytes of code. If it does, you SERIOUSLY need to read a book on assembly.

[01000101]

Brynet-Inc: did you really need to post that utterly useless post? Also, the competition is not pointless to everyone. I think having these competitions are great as they are not time consuming and it's good fun in a normally boring environment.

I agree that waiting until Feb would be a little overboard. I program in C and just use the Intel manuals as a guide for assembly programming and I'm confident that I can write something functional in 512 bytes in less than a week.

[Troy Martin]

Yeah.

Almost done my entry, what 'bout you guys?

[quok]

Quok: I think that does deserve points That's probably the first time I've heard of that in a boot sector! Now you should've made the bootsector a FALSE interpreter, that would be a hell of an entry.

To be fair, my bootsector doesn't include the Forth interpreter or set up the environment that one would need. I simply require a Forth interpreter to build the bootsector. I also cheat in that my bootsector doesn't understand the ISO9660 filesystem. It uses the el torito boot info table to load the specified block list. It would be possible to add a mini ISO9660 driver but I'm sure that's quickly go over the 512 byte limit.

Basically my bootsector is meant to be prepended to whatever binary is used as the boot image on the CD. So that this doesn't go any farther off topic, I'll start a separate topic about it once I finish debugging things, which should be tonight or tomorrow.

[Troy Martin]

Nifty. Should really do a FALSE interpreter though. It would be real simple.

/idea kicks in

[JohnnyTheDon]

I have one done, but its really just a chainloader with a command line interface XD

As a future competition, why don't we do an el torito version (2048 bytes instead of 512 bytes)? It might be interesting to see if we can do things like SMP and long mode.