Binbows 98 Second Edition

The complete product page. Every feature listed below exists in some form, for some value of "exists" and a generous reading of "feature."

Binbows 98 SE is the second and final edition of Binbows 98, which makes it the best one by process of elimination. It ships as a single hybrid ISO of about 3.2 MB, and it is not an operating system in the load-bearing sense: it is one EFI application that your firmware runs directly, with no kernel underneath it and nothing to install. It draws a splash screen, crashes on purpose, and hands you a command prompt. If you have used a computer in the late nineties, you already know how to use it. If you haven't, type HELP.

The launch advertisement. Photography by whoever owned the camera.

The boot sequence

There is no installer and no desktop. From power-on to prompt there are exactly four things, in this order, and then it is your turn.

The boot splash

Windows 9x kept its splash screen in LOGO.SYS at the root of the boot drive: a 320x400 BMP wearing a misleading extension, shown stretched to 640x400. Both halves of that convention are honoured here, so a bitmap drawn for the real thing works unchanged.

• Bring your own. Replace LOGO.SYS on the medium with any uncompressed BMP at 8, 24 or 32 bits per pixel. LOGO.BMP works as a name too.
• Whole-pixel scaling. Nearest neighbour, centred, integer factors only — 320x400 fills 1280x800 exactly, with no interpolation and no blur.
• The moving bar is a lie. Nothing is redrawn and nothing moves. The colours travel underneath stationary pixels by rotating palette entries, which is precisely why the original bitmap was 8-bit.
• It tells you when it fails. Type LOGO at the prompt and it either shows the splash again or explains exactly why it couldn't.

The animated band is found rather than assumed: the rows using the ramp entries must form a thin strip touching the bottom edge, or the image is left alone. An unrelated 8-bit bitmap does not get its colours cycled at it.

What goes wrong

Something does, straight away, and the machine tells you about it at length. It is drawn full-screen, measured and centred so it fits whatever panel you booted on, and it is legible at any resolution — which is more than the thing it is imitating ever managed.

We are not printing it here. It names three modules, gives a diagnosis of your hardware configuration that is in our view fair, and it is four seconds away. Whatever else Binbows gets wrong, it gets this right, and reading it off a page spoils it. You can go back for another look at any time with BIN, which is the closest thing Binbows has to a Start button.

The recovery console

Press any key at that point and you land here. It is not a picture of a prompt. It is a prompt: line editing, backspace, command history on the arrow keys, ESC to clear the line, a cursor that blinks between keystrokes — all of it running on firmware input, with no operating system anywhere in the machine.

Michaelsoft Binbows 98
   (C) Copyright Michaelsoft Corp 1981-1998.

Recovery console. Type HELP for a list of commands.

C:\>DIR

 Volume in drive C is BINBOWS
 Directory of C:\

AUTOEXEC BAT           117
CONFIG   SYS            96
README   TXT           703
LOGO     SYS       129,078
EFI            <DIR>

C:\>_

DIR, CD, TYPE and VOL operate on the medium you booted from. Names, sizes, timestamps and free space are read live through the UEFI Simple File System protocol — nothing in that listing is canned, and if you drop a file onto the stick it shows up.

The command set

Everything HELP lists, plus the two it doesn't. Full usage notes are on the using Binbows page.

Around forty commands from the other operating system are also recognised. Not with a generic error, either — each one is declined personally, and we are not going to list them. Type the one you use most and see what it says about you.

Known not to work yet

Everything advertised is on the disc. Some of it does not currently start, which our engineering department describes as a scheduling matter.

Editions & pricing

All editions are the same download. There is no installer to lie to, so the difference is entirely a matter of how you describe yourself afterwards.

Download any edition

Volume licensing, site licences and academic pricing are handled by [email protected], who will confirm that the price is zero and that this remains true at any volume. Resellers: [email protected]. Margins are excellent in percentage terms.

System requirements

Most people run Binbows in a virtual machine on hardware roughly 12,000 times more powerful than required. It does not go 12,000 times faster. It does, however, reach the prompt before your firmware finished drawing its own logo. See running Binbows in a VM.

Under the hood

For a joke, it is put together with some care. The parts that make it work, briefly — the long version is on the developer page.

• C17, clang, no SDK. Compiled to a PE/COFF EFI application. No GNU-EFI, no EDK2 — just a minimal uefi.h with the types actually needed.
• Straight to the framebuffer. Everything is drawn through UEFI GOP. There is no console driver between the code and your pixels.
• The IBM VGA 8x16 font. All 256 CP437 code points embedded, which is why CHARS can show the smileys, the arrows and the card suits — in CP437 those are glyphs, not control characters.
• A colour plane beside the text. One palette index per cell, so colour scrolls, clears and repaints along with the characters instead of being painted over them. That is what lets FETCH draw the flag.
• Real machine details. CPU brand from cpuid leaves 0x80000002–4, firmware vendor from the system table.
• Box drawing that scrolls. Dialog frames use CP437's double-line box characters, emitted as ordinary output lines, so they scroll with everything else rather than floating above it.
• A hybrid ISO/GPT image. Bootable as a virtual CD and as a USB stick, on real hardware, without a second build.