PC interrupts

What Hacker News says

1. burnt-resistorAug 2025
   Seems a bit obsessed with open source when abandonware like Borland C++ 3.1 and Pascal 7.0 are amazing.

   Also, missing the very important, closer to primary sources, physical dead tree resources that are needed as reference to program things.

   - Black Book of Graphics Programming (Special Edition) (now FOSS)

   - Programmer's Guide To The EGA, VGA, And Super VGA Cards (3rd Edition)

   - PC-Intern (where I learned how Central Point, Norton, and later FreeBSD made "GUI" with sub-character graphical pointers in text mode through custom fonts)

   - Undocumented PC

   - Undocumented DOS

   - PC Interrupts (and) Uninterrupted Interrupts (Ralf Brown)

   - Microsoft MS-DOS Programmer's Reference

   - The Programmer's PC Sourcebook: Reference Tables for IBM PCs and Compatibles, PS/2 Systems, EISA-based Systems, MS-DOS Operating System Through Version 5

   - (various hardware books by MindShare)

   - Also useful would be real BIOS dumps and (dis)assembly, and MS-DOS source

   - Emulators are no substitute for the real thing because the problem is that no emulator (commercial or otherwise) is faithful to the quirks, capabilities, and limitations of real hardware (in system, protected mode debuggers/profilers sure are nice though compared to triggering lockup, spontaneous reboot, or a beeping deadlock). If anyone remembers Bochs, its floppy behavior definitely doesn't act or look anything like a real FDC. (I submitted some patches for it many moons ago in college.)

   (Yep, I own a "braindead" 286, 386DX, 486DX-100, Am5, and P5, P2, P Pro, and P4.)

   Because if something can't work on real hardware and original OSes, then it's probably make believe. Prefer to make honest, real things wherever feasible.

   Show morethread
2. 0xff00ffeeMar 2020
   I had a giant pink book of PC BIOS that was my bible from 1988 to 1994 before the internet took off. I can't for the life of me remember who published it, but it had everything you needed to know about PC BIOS and an old IBM bios source listing. It was over 600 pages.

   It look liked this 1200 page book, but this isn't it (also a book I used):

   https://www.amazon.com/PC-Interrupts-Programmers-Reference-T...

   I also had the Apple ][+ ROM listing in one of those spiral-bound books from apple circa 1980 but that too has been lost, sadly.

   Show morethread
3. pansa2Feb 2020
   Ah, the famous “Ralph Brown’s Interrupt List”. It was actually published as a book: https://www.amazon.com/PC-Interrupts-Programmers-Reference-T...
   thread