Jack: Are you more interested in actually getting your program to work, or in trying to prove that you're smarter than everybody else?
Let's take this from the perspective of someone trying to write a BIOS. If I were trying to do that, I would do my due diligence and obtain as many references as I could. This would include BIOS Central, RBIL, and as many "hard books" as I could reasonably get hold of. Some people have been doing research on this in the background, and nobody yet has reported a hard book saying anything at all 40:8F. BIOS Central says one thing, RBIL says another. Which one is right? Maybe both (different BIOS's on different computers), maybe neither. I do know that both of these are secondary, not primary, sources. At least some of their information is gathered by experimentation on specific computers, and can be pure conjecture. Extrapolating information from specific computers and applying it to all computers is, at best, reckless. Which one do I believe? I can't believe either one. I need another source of corroboration, one that I know didn't just copy their information from BIOS Central or RBIL. So, I go to a primary, official source -- The IBM Technical Reference (it doesn't get any more official or primary than that). The IBM PS/2 Technical Reference from 1991 simply says that 40:8F is "Reserved". So, what do I do with 40:8F in my BIOS? The short answer is, I can do anything I want. If somebody points the finger back at me and says, "It should work like BIOS Central says," I can laugh and say, "Says who?" BIOS Central does not have any more credibility than RBIL, and neither one of them can touch IBM. UIDE is using an undocumented and unverifiable feature and needs to be fixed. VirtualBox is "following the rules." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
