Hex Editor

A bootable hex editor you can type x86 bytecode into and run it.

Enough to bootstrap anything you want with no other tools. But, I think the very first thing you'd do is write a text editor and assembler, then hand-assemble it and type it in (which is v1.0).

This release adds some niceties on top of v0.1 so that the hex editor is feasibly usable (like being able to fix mistakes).

I have a few more ideas planned for this hex editor to make it still useful after I have written the assembler version. So this won't be the final version of the hex editor code.

Features:

• Running user-typed hex code through the CPU in 16 bit real mode
• Scrolling the buffer and editing previously entered text with replacement mode
• Memory location / line numbers display
• Instructions printed on screen
• Nice bash script for downloading the reference manuals needed (and optionally use LaTeX to add a table of contents to the BIOS manual)

Instructions

• ./reference_manuals/get_docs to download reference manuals and get bookmarks in the IBM bios manual
• ./boot boostrap.asm assembles the code and starts it in qemu
• dd if=bin/bootstrap.bin of=/dev/sdb && sync writes it to a flash drive for booting on real hardware. Make sure you change /dev/sdb to the correct device name!