GP2X Programming New Gp2x Bootloader

[Dex]

I might be interested in your MiniDos OS for my Sanyo MBC-55x hobby project (I wrote a BIOS for the old 80's partial IBM compatable) - FreeDOS is somewhat of a memory hog on it, so if your DOS runs in 16 bit and is even marginally compatable with simple programs (nasm, etc), I wouldn't mind taking a look.

My BIOS is only 3KB or so UPX compressed (and includes a rather bizarre feature - 256 bit AES disk encryption), so a 2KB DOS add-on could be quite impressive to include in it.

Sorry BradN must of mist this post, you can get MiniDOS here:
http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=5275

@ YakumoFuji, I sure will .
Regards Dex.

 

[Muncher666]

I might be interested in your MiniDos OS for my Sanyo MBC-55x hobby project (I wrote a BIOS for the old 80's partial IBM compatable) - FreeDOS is somewhat of a memory hog on it, so if your DOS runs in 16 bit and is even marginally compatable with simple programs (nasm, etc), I wouldn't mind taking a look.

My BIOS is only 3KB or so UPX compressed (and includes a rather bizarre feature - 256 bit AES disk encryption), so a 2KB DOS add-on could be quite impressive to include in it.

Sorry BradN must of mist this post, you can get MiniDOS here:
http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=5275

@ YakumoFuji, I sure will .
Regards Dex.

Forgive my ignorance, but what sort of compatability does/will MiniDOS have with legacy DOS applications? Will rewriting an x86 OS for ARM give old DOS programs a bizarre chance of running almost natively on ARM hardware? Or am I a nutter?

Allan.

 

[BradN]

No chance. DOS (and many DOS applications) rely on lots of low level assumptions of the architecture, and it just wouldn't be feasable.

Now, if you were to look at something like win32 compatability, that would probably be more feasible performance wise, because the applications tend to use many more libraries and functions of the OS that, with some appropriate emulation and linking with native code, these libraries could be run natively and it only has to emulate x86 for the application code itself. It would still be very very tricky though.

 

[Dex]

BradN's right, but what i want to do is to be able to program for the gp2x, just like you could for Dos, EG: direct to hardware, The old dos programs will not be compatable with the new OS, But the idea is to be able to make better games, if dos type of games is all you want, you would be better sticking with linux.

Also note: MiniDos was just a week long project, Dex4u the OS i am porting has taken me 3 years so far.

BOOTLOADER UPDATE, the bootloader is moving along, i have made some programs to dump debug messages to Dex4u and the uart code in the bootloader is also now working, i will be making a ver that can be tested with out changing you currant setting, so no need to flash unless you want to.