pouët.net

I personally am un-aware of any pc bootsector intros. Could someone point me out to any nice places to find them, that is if a sufficient pc-bootsector scene does exists? kthxbye

There was definitely one that was for a booter game (Winter Games IIRC). 1986, don't remember the group. Static image with 8x8 pixel font scroller.

I used to have it and I can't find it any more :-( It's the first cracktro for PC that I can recall...

I've always thought PC bootsector intro would be a nice compo category at parties.

didnt that american army game boot by itself and thus could be considered a boot game? :)

just a dumb question here: why are bootsectros always considered 512b while its normally way more than that ? just coz its under 1k and above 512b ? doesnt make sense ! maybe a new category should be inserted finally :P

That might be the case for amiga, but at least for the ST, you can only fit 480 bytes in a bootsector (if you want the disk to be readable by the system that is)

yeah, still every system has some startup-code and different startup-sizes !
so none of em bootros is 512b at all !
thats why i ask for a new category@pouet !

just to clarify: on Amiga ( the only Sys i lived in the 90s ;) ) there was some "war" going on just as nowadays in the 4k-category....who squeezes the most available bytes out of the bootblock ! and it was a valid platform just as demos/intros/40ks ! just there were no compos at parties, just the normal behaviour of showing off what can be done ! as far as my horizon goes until today, theres still no real Winner in that category as no1 ever bothered to look all em booties up ;) all i know is: i think the amiga had the most bootros on any platform, and also the most competition in being the best in this amount of bytes...whatever it was in the end ! i guess sth like 770b !

This is bootsector intro.
http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=53992
I have a assembler code of this intro.
I will upload it to somewhere if you want it.
(But comments of the code are written in Japanese)

We can write a intro smaller than 512bytes in ms-dos(.com).
But ms-dos demo doesn't run in Vista and 7 without emulator.
I think it is difficult to write 512 bytes or more smaller intro in PE format.
Bootsector intro might be a only platform which allow to make a very small intro in recent PC without emulator.

But it is not easy to run a bootsector intro in real machine without emulator.
AFAIK, writing image of it to first sector of a USB memory is easiest way to execute it.
Most of modern PC supports boot from USB memory, but dont have floppy disk drive.

A emulator(like bochs or qemu) will be needed to test/debug bootsector intro.

@tomohiro
Never actually saw a bootsector intro nor have I seen the code of it.
Will be an interesting read! Any chance you could put it up somewhere :-) ?

You can use 1012 bytes for code when it comes to Amiga bootblock intros! 770b is errm, well, nonsense. :)

that is why hardy used the term "guess" ;)

Might also be that he meant how many bytes can be used so that the disk would still boot to DOS (which apparently is not possible if you use all of the 1012 for "custom" code), in that case you can use 1012-30 bytes which is still a lot more than 770b. =)

just 30 bytes to be DOSable ? i had more in mind ! ok, total nonsense then, stingray still knows the shit !
anyone maybe interested to enlighten me/us how big bootblocks are on other machines/diskdrives maybe ?
could be some worthable lesson to any scener !

this calls for some breakpoint seminar!
..

..oh wait.

You can download assembler code of the AFLAtoxin from this page.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OOIFQI0A

Infomations about how to make OS might be helpful when you make bootsector intro.
http://mikeos.berlios.de/
I heard that MMX and SSEx can be used in real mode.

Just an wild suggestion:

maybe one way to start would be stury the grub code:

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/

they're doing some kind of SVGA resolution init etc..

GRUB is multistage though, i.e. much larger than just a bootsector.

Oh and by the way: "bootman", the bootmanager from BeOS was MBR-only and had a nice little mandelbrot effect easteregg built-in.

For PC, it's actually 448 bytes.

for apple ][ it's actually 256 bytes, but iirc in a DOS 3.2/3.3 Disk you'd have the whole track 0 for yourself (13 or 16 sectors, 3.25k to 4k in total).

@tomohiro: of course MMX and SSE can be used in real mode, why shouldn't they? You can even run 32bit operations in RM (and evaluate 32 bits EAs too!).

To follow on from trixter, it's 510 bytes if you don't care about having a FAT8 filesystem on the floppy (which I think he was referring to with 448). Setting the last two bytes to 0x55 and 0xAA are enough the tell the BIOS the volume's bootable.

Just had a play; really nice way to work IMHO. If you stay in real mode, you need virtually no startup code and the PC looks like an oldschool machine, except with no custom hardware but practically infinite CPU cycles per pixel.

See last listing on http://www.supernovah.com/Tutorials/BootSector5.php for minimal startup code.

Heh.. these guys just had a 512 byte OS compo :)

http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=21042

If we want to get truly g00fy, someone has painstakingly written a boot sector that interprets FAT and can load an .EXE file and run it (don't use any DOS calls of course): http://alexfru.chat.ru/epm.html#bootprog