Good morning. Driving the dot matrix printer from my little real-mode toy OS. 🖨️

(This is just a wrapper around BIOS INT 17. I love it nonetheless. 😅)

https://movq.de/v/6b3f9a2837/MVI_8839.MOV.mp4

(#fvvdrjq) @movq@www.uninformativ.de Woah, heck yeah, congratulations, mate!

(#fvvdrjq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @dce@hashnix.club It’s pretty cool, I won’t argue that, but also really simple, to be completely honest. 😅 The BIOS already provides all you need to send data to the printer:

https://helppc.netcore2k.net/interrupt/bios-printer-services

The BIOS actually does provide a great deal of things, which, to me, was one of the most surprising learnings of this project (the project of writing a little 16-bit real-mode OS, that is). It often doesn’t feel like I was writing an operating system – it felt more like writing a normal program that just uses BIOS calls like we would use syscalls these days.

(I’ve also read a lot of warnings, like “don’t use the BIOS for this or that”. Mostly because it tends to be very slow.)

(#fvvdrjq) @movq@www.uninformativ.de Despite you claim it to be pretty simple, rest assured, you’re still a wizard to me. :-)