no its not dead. just a little side tracked.. still working on a disk system and graphics.. - probable it will take up to the end of the year if not longer.

i think rules of this contest should be changed a little.

BIOS INTs allowed.

unreal, dpmi, pm, rm allowed.

use of a still existing OS allowed.

the goal is just to have a browser thats will start in a very short time after bios post.

BUT all code SHOULD be compilable with last version of FASM.

no end time for the contest. the contest ends when there will be at least 2 differents interresting entries, of course, my current entry is invalid because it don't work at all.

then, for the moment, the leading version is DEX's one.

edfed: I think you got your contests mixed up. This is a challenge not a contest. BIOS INT's are perfectly acceptable.

Everything that was needed to finish the challenge we did, but we had one big problem, that all hobby OS Dev's have, that is because we could not be shore what hardware people had, we could not boot in the time set, this defeated the point.

But if we wanted, we could have a working test ver done in about 6 weeks, but its the motive to do it is just not there, as no one would use it or want it, other than OS Dev's fopr the code.

I think the first post of this 15-page thread doesn't reflect the goal very well and it is very hard to read through all of them and ... can somebody please make a conclusion here? I know there was a browser with 4 buttons some time ago, but I haven't run it - just saw the image posted.

What the code needs to do in the future? Boot in 10 seconds, enable NIC & go to flatassembler.net?

exact.

boot in less than 10 seconds, go to flatassembler.net, that's all.

Yes, written entirely in x86 Asm, assembled with FASM.

Aims where in two stages
step 1.
Boot in 10 seconds, enable NIC & go to a helloWorld web page over the net
step 2.
Boot in 10 seconds, enable NIC & go to flatassembler.net

PS: How many of you have a RTL8139 ethernnet card, so you can test ?, when needed.

my state:
Boot(OK), Enable Vesa(OK), switch PM(OK), Enable Mouse(..), Enable NIC(..), show boot/hello.html(OK) using PIO(..), show http://board.flatassembler.net(..)

the (..) steps are required.

edfed, Dex4u, can you show me, where's the bootable image or the source to assemble it from.

What I certainly do NOT have is a DOS machine or a Win98. All my boxes run 64-bit OSs RTL8xxx I can find though...

Hi Dex!!!
Yes, I have a RealTek RTL 8139 card.

Hi Madis!!
Thanks VERY MUCH, for instructing me about SeaMonkey. I have used it for the past two weeks, as I was engaged in testing and retesting all of my computers using Linux, Win98, and WinXP.

I found some very interesting results, which I will post here in a couple of days, if I find time to finish it up.

Fundamentally, relating to your comment below:

Here is just a preliminary, "alpha" version of the results, subject to further change, with additional testing:

computer A: 64 bit, modern dual core, dual channel, the whole 9 yards:

times in seconds

OS....................boot......music on.....power off

win98.....forbidden by chip set

win XP (32 bit)....30...........8...............12

Linux (32 bit).....28...........20...............8

Linux (64 bit).....65............7..............30

Computer B: (the one with the Realtek ethernet card, PCI interface: DFI motherboard, PIII, 1 GHz, 0.5 Gig memory, SATA 150 PCI controller with SATA hard disk)

win98................38............14..............4

win XP (32 bit)....50............12..............12

Linux (32 bit)......42...........18...............9

Linux (64 bit)....forbidden by chip set

nota bene: those FAST times with Linux 64 bit, for booting, i.e. ONLY 65 seconds, were obtained ONLY with XFCE, not KDE or Gnome. (Slackware)

Thanks for the times tom tobias. All of those times completely suck. My old Amstrad CPC 464 would boot in <1 second and it was a Z80 4MHz. My latest ARM 4-core board boots in <0.5 second and is off in <0.001 seconds (but no music on that system, oh and no Linux or Windows either). So I am sure that this challenge can do much better than the current offering of general OSes can give.

I already mentioned this quote in another thread but it is such a great quote that I want to mention it again.

The last ver that was released are here: http://dex4u.com/FAB/
But theres a later ver that will be released soon.

my version will not be realesed before a long time as i am restarting coding since a week only.

but i am pretty sure it will be very good because of fool.

[edit]dosin gave me a working bootable ata reader.
i analyse it, adapt it to fool, and will start coding for the NIC.