New: a hard drive bootloader and a low-level I/O library

[stepleton]

Hi list, I hope you're all doing well...

I've made two new low-level software items for Lisa. First, there's a hard drive bootloader:
https://github.com/stepleton/bootloader_hd
It's not too sophisticated: it doesn't know about filesystems, and it works a lot like my floppy bootloader --- it just loads blocks into RAM, starting from block $000002 until it sees it should stop.

The bootloader uses the second project: a low-level I/O library in 68k assembly that I've started here:
https://github.com/stepleton/lisa_io
Right now it has components for keyboard and mouse input, fixed-width text display on the screen, and reads/writes to parallel port hard drives. No floppy or serial port support yet---maybe someday later.

You can see a boring demonstration of both on YouTube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WP4kkj1mRM

I hope these will be useful. Please stay safe!

[rayarachelian]

Yeay! Glad it's published!

You know this is how operating systems get written, they start out as small tiny things like bootloaders, or in the case of Linux, a terminal program.
(hint hint)

[stepleton]

The thought had crossed my mind, but my style is pretty basic :-)
Interrupts shminterrupts...