opening DOS bios

[bcromwell]

Only reason I'm using it is because it was allready installed. It's said to be the worst one microsoft has ever made.

Sorry about this. Off topic.

Na, Vista take the cake for the worst one ever made in my book. I would take ME over Vista any day

[The Blight]

Ah yeah. Forgot about that because I'm avoiding it like the plague.

[Robin Hewitt]

Back in yesteryear when we wanted to find out what was installed port-wise as acceptable to DOS we used the debug program...

debug gives you a little minus sign prompt. Don't panic. Give it

d 40:0

and it will dump the part of memory where such things are stored, the first line will show serial and parallel port addresses. The addresses are least significant byte first so 378 would show as 78 03

q

will exit back to the command prompt.

I presume modern BIOS's still do this. Wonder if they still contain the text "NOT IBM" strategically arranged to line up with the address where IBM BIOS said "IBM"

Of course parallel ports can now be set bidirectional. The first screen that comes up VGA on boot is the BIOS, it usually has instructions on how to get in and change things, but that may flash past faster than the eye can see.