Timothy Normand Miller wrote:
> Which of these assemblers is most common?  If the only difference is
> some directives, then I suggest flipping a coin or doing an informal
> vote.  I know that people get attached to their tools, but changing
> assemblers isn't the most disruptive thing, especially if you can just
> grab it with apt-get.
>
> I cast my vote for nasm, because it's the one I have installed, and I
> don't have gas.
>   
+1 vote for nasm.  It's commonly available on Linux distributions and it
uses Intel syntax.  Both of these are personal reasons, not technical. 
But, still my vote is for nasm.

>> Also probably needs to be tested on more than one bios -- Award,
>> American Megatrends (AMI) and Phoenix etc etc. They all would call
>> both the setup code and the int 0x10 interface. For example someone
>> mentioned that a bios generated logo was done by changing the fonts,
>> so that needs to work.
>>     
>
> Most DOS software seems to just write directly to the display memory.
> They don't bother with int10.  And of course, protected mode stuff
> can't call int10.
>   
> The text mode breaks the 32K area into 4K slices.  I think there's
> like 7 screens and the 8th slice contains the font.  I don't recall
> for sure.  It will be the job of the microcode in HQ to read the font
> and use it to render characters correctly.  We'll make it not cache
> anything; if you change the font, it'll change all the characters on
> the display immediately.
>
> The commercial entities that want to license our VGA core don't want
> to work with open code, so all the stuff you do needs to be original
> work so that we can relicense it.
>   
It is highly unlikely that we could not have completely original code. 
The BIOS will be so specific to the hardware that is will, almost be by
definition, unique.


> Since you guys are doing the BIOS, which I'm very happy about, it
> should probably also be you guys who do the code for HQ as well.
> Petter already developed an assembler for it, and it's in SVN.
>
>   



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