There should be a forum for BIOS. It can be considered as a major part of a computer. Also, there are a lot of abandoned, and are no longer used.

It maybe not well accepted, since these are customized by the manufacturer and there is not an standard for these (And the point of BetaArchive is the most pure forms of software). But if you'd like some forums of this, you can search on Google

Hmm. Why is it always the new members with their "suggestions" ?

And what is it with old members disrespecting new members? Everyone has a say, even if they may appear stupid or not.

computebrute, consider yourself warned.


We add a forum section if there's an overly interest in the topic.

There is not much to talk about when it goes to BIOS, a forum would be pretty much pointless. It just does its job and really isn't as exciting as Windows or other pieces of software. BIOS also never really changed since the '90s if you don't count EFI, so "abandonedness" doesn't play a big role either.

If you want to talk about BIOS, you can do so in General Discussion.

Wouldn't you need the original hardware to run the BIOS properly anyway?

I believe that there are emulators that make use of the BIOS for some specific machines, such as 86Box and some console emulators.

I think every emulator must have a BIOS of some sort. As an example, PCem and 86Box make it obvious that you need a BIOS image since they make you download one from somewhere - they don't include them with the emulator because it's third-party software and the legal status of distributing the BIOS isn't obvious. Bochs and QEMU on the other hand include BIOS images which are built from open source code and thus can be distributed freely, so it's not so obvious that they use a BIOS, but they do. It's actually a little more obvious in Bochs since the configuration file mentions it; for QEMU it looks like there's a command-line option to provide a BIOS image.

As for whether you could use a different BIOS image with Bochs, QEMU, etc., I'm not sure. I presume BIOSes tend to be hard-coded for the chipset on the motherboard (and perhaps other hardware on the motherboard), so you'd need to find one that matched the emulated hardware?

Edit: To clarify, I think emulators need to have a BIOS because most/all OSes will use at least some of the BIOS at some point. DOS will make lots of use of it, more modern OSes might just use it a little at startup and then start talking directly to the hardware. I think the BIOS is responsible for actually starting the boot loader, too.

Not that I know why all this is relevant DOS, but to summarize: Yes, you need the physical hardware to use the real BIOS images, or code an emulator that specifically emulates the hardware that the BIOS supports.

From a beta and abandonware point of view BIOS:es are pointless. These are freely downloadable from the vendors support sites, hardware bound 100% and has very little general interest apart from those that are used in emulations, like the one DOS mentioned.

Therefore we will not make a special forum for a topic that is mentioned once in a decade, the General discussion forum will be fine for this.

We could make a new forum for Linux distros. We wouldn't have to archive them as I think most are freely available from the maker of the distro.

We had a Linux section until the great re-shuffle happened a few years back. No-one really missed it.

We don't make new forums just for the fun of it as we don't need to have a truckload of dead and inactive forum sections cluttering the entire forum structure. When we see a particular need for a new forum we will add it and move the relevant topics to it.