Solitaire, written inside the bootloader | Hacker News Reader

Solitaire, written inside the bootloader

github.com

66 pointsmasneyb8 comments

awesome...good job.....

You guys did it inside the bootloader.

Whenever I switch on my computer just for watching a movie or listen to music and nothing else... I feel it so unnecessary to boot up my fedora, load my cpu and ram with programs that has nothing to do with video player.... I was wondering if there is any stable minimal OS which is dedicated only for movies, songs, and nothing else.... I am aware of couple of media centers such as kodi, osmc and openelec.... But haven't found any minimalistic systems....

For existing audio hardware there are projects like http://www.rockbox.org that are minimalistic firmware replacements that you can hack on. On the video side I can't think of anything similar to DVD firmware that's open source but that sounds like what you're looking for. I've attempted a few slimmed down Linux distros for the Raspberry Pi and alternative OSes that can play back media. Things to check out would be: RISC OS, OpenElec, PiCore, PiPlay, Minibian...

Try KolibriOS[1]. It does have a media player AFAIK.

Also, it comes on a single floppy.

[1] http://wiki.kolibrios.org/wiki/Main_Page

geexbox is the closest thing i can think of. You can even use http://www.geexbox.org/iso-generator/ to put the movie and the os on disc/usb and boot to the movie basically.

Could someone please explain why the limit is 510 bytes and not 448 bytes? Asking because I thought that the last 64 bytes were reserved for the partition table? Any link to where I can get a refresher on this topic?

Quite a few bioes only check to see if the boot signature is there, and don't bother validating the partition table, so effectively you can use those bytes if you don't care about compatibility.

Wikipedia has a good article to dust the memory off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

Not an expert but since they didn't plan on actually booting an OS, perhaps they didn't need the partition table so those 64 bytes could go toward more instructions for solitaire.

Great video! Very funny. Well done writing Solitaire in only 510 bytes of assembly!

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