n0p wrote on 2023-12-04, 18:05:As for origins on Book8088 - i would like to summirize what i personally know so far:
Done by a person or a team named "Cycle Lo […]
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As for origins on Book8088 - i would like to summirize what i personally know so far:
Done by a person or a team named "Cycle Logic"
Knows how to program STM microcontrollers (STC8G2K32S4), controls keyboard, Turbo, Mute and some leds - found by Retroplayer @ VCFED
Knows CLPD programming quite good- XT-IO and CGA logic are there, and COM/LPT IO were added on V2 fast
Did a good study on Sergey's BIOS (not only to remove copyrights 😀) - look at the number of Chinese comments in published archives
Both DZT and Hardcore Expert guys @ Aliexpress are not the authors. Both took time to answer simplest tech questions and referred to sending those to "technicians"
Tend to keep production price to a most minimum - that might answer EPROM vs EEPROM question
PR:
Aliexpress store managers are friendly and can help if exact problem is presented (i use two-way Google translate to make sure it says what i mean)
Promised to change BIOS in V2 - did not
Provided wiping copyrights reason is nonsensical - GPL does not prohibit selling.
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With all that said - it's a really niche product and i'm glad it exists and at that price - as acquiring/making an XT seem to be near impossible task to me.
That is an interesting analysis. I think it is quite possible that "Cycle Logic", "Hardcore Expert" and Shan Zhongyu are the same person, or a team including Shan Zhongyu.
Possibly that one person or a small team developed the system and then someone else builds these systems, and yet another company or companies sell that.
This approach seems to be pretty common among Chinese companies.
Regarding understanding of the BIOS and comments in Chinese, I did this analysis half a year ago: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/chi … 52/post-1318112
A few interesting points:
- The Book 8088 specific modifications were minimal and didn't show good understanding of the working of the BIOS.
- There are a few workarounds to make Book8088 work. Particularly, it appears that early Book 8088 didn't have speaker control bits in port 61h readable.
- They did not take advantage of the configurability of the BIOS. For example, they commented out or removed chunks of code that was there to support other platforms (Xi 8088, FE2010A). They could have used %ifdefs instead fairly easily.
- There are a lot of comments in Chinese in the AT-style keyboard controller code, that is not used in Book 8088. I don't know why they went through a trouble of documenting it and then not using it. Another piece of code with Chinese comments is delay.inc, and that one has "SHAN" name in it, likely referring to Shan Zhongyu.
BTW, if you make changes to 8088 BIOS, that you feel will be useful to others, please feel free to submit pull requests in GitHub