Re: ELKS 0.0.81 available from ftp.ecs.soton.ac.uk

[Thomas Stewart]

> > Not really--All I know is that PCs and XTs fell back on cassette BASIC
> > when the disk boot failed--AMI BIOS still makes a call to it when it
> > fails, but the BASIC roms don't exist in post-8088s.  It does seem
> > intriguing, though. I'll see what I can come up with.
> >
>
>I have come across a few old machies that had sockets like this, but never
>one that actually had a BASIC rom in it. I don't know what the ROM in this
>socket needs to contain in order for the BIOS to recognise it as a BASIC
>ROM and run it if boot fails.
>
>Interestingly enough the ELONEX 486DX33 I use for testing ELKS alot of the
>time has cassette BASIC built into its BIOS. I only found out by accident
>because I took out the harddrive.
>
>Al
>

If I remember right the bios setup replaces the basic, On my 386, if you 
call basic (with an int or someting, did it years ago and can't remember) 
the bios setup loaded. The original IBM PC's had basic on a rom, but I do 
not know how big the rom was.

tom
hope this is not too much garbage.

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