Retro MS-DOS Coding - Recreating the Iconic Award BIOS Screen

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Because why not, it looks simpler than it really is and we’ll get to fall down a rabbit hole trying to draw the Energy Star logo.

Once you’ve tested the compiler and figured out how to work the IDE, what next? It seems a bit of a jump going straght into a massive project.

I’m attempting to learn how to write DOS and x86 programs and need something a bit more complex than printing “Hello World”, but not so complex that I need to spend six months learning the inner bowels of a PC or its VGA card before starting.

Being unable to think of anything, I was sat staring at my emulated PC as it booted up and decided the BIOS boot screen would do. It’s mostly text, but there’s a curious image in the upper right of the screen. That big Energy Star logo. Except this is the BIOS, on a 90s PC. It’s in text mode. How’s that work?

Recreating the majority of this is easy, it’s just a load of printf() statements and some code to position the cursor properly.

The logo though? Let’s go down that rabbit hole…