Using Binbows 98

A practical guide to the recovery console, written for people who either forgot how this worked or were not born yet. Both groups are welcome. One group is having more fun. There is no desktop and no mouse — everything below happens at a prompt.

The first thirty seconds

Boot the medium in UEFI mode and it takes over immediately. Nothing asks you anything, nothing installs, and nothing is written to any disk at any point.

The splash. C:\LOGO.SYS appears with its bar animating. It gives up on you after four seconds; any key skips it sooner.
Something goes wrong. Read what it says — all of it. We are not reprinting it here. Then press any key.
The prompt. C:\> and a blinking cursor. Type HELP.

If you only do one thing: type FETCH. The flag, in code page 437 block characters, with a system report beside it — and enough of that report is genuinely your machine to be unsettling.

Keys the console listens to

A short list, because there is a short list. Everything here is handled by hand against the UEFI Simple Text Input protocol, polled between cursor blinks.

Binbows recovery console key bindings
Key	Does
`Enter`	Runs the line. Commands are case-insensitive, so `dir` and `DIR` are the same command.
`Backspace`	Deletes the character behind the cursor. That is the whole line editor, essentially.
`↑` / `↓`	Walks back and forward through command history. The single most useful key on the machine.
`Esc`	Clears the current line. More forgiveness than the era usually offered.
`Any key`	On the splash: skip it. On the blue screen: drop to the prompt. This is the entire mouse-free interaction model.
`Ctrl+Alt+Del`	Does exactly what the blue screen says it does, because your firmware is handling it, not us.
The power button	The documented exit procedure. See `EXIT`.

Command reference

HELP prints this list at the prompt, framed in CP437 box characters. Here it is with room to explain itself.

Every command Binbows 98 answers to
Command	What it does
`HELP` · `?`	Lists the commands, and reminds you about the arrow keys.
`VER`	The version nobody asked for, plus your resolution, text grid and font magnification.
`DIR`	Lists the current directory. Real names, real sizes, real timestamps, real free space. No arguments, no wildcards.
`CD dir` · `CHDIR`	Changes directory. `CD ..` goes up, `CD \` goes to the root, absolute paths work.
`TYPE file`	Prints a file. Tabs expand to eight columns; CRLF counts as one break. Long files take their time — see below.
`VOL`	Volume label, size and free space, read off the medium rather than remembered.
`MEM`	A memory usage report. One of the rows is not a real category of memory.
`FETCH` · `NEOFETCH`	The flag in CP437 shade blocks, with a system report beside it. Mostly true.
`LOGO`	Shows the boot splash again — or tells you exactly why it can't, which is the useful half.
`CHARS`	All 256 code page 437 glyphs as a labelled 16×16 grid.
`CLS`	Clears the screen.
`ECHO text`	Repeats text back at you. Try it with no argument.
`FORMAT C:`	Formats the hard drive. Bold of you. Nothing is actually touched; stay for the ending.
`BIN` · `CRASH`	Starts Michaelsoft Binbows 98: splash, blue screen, keypress, back here. The nearest thing to a Start button.
`EXIT`	There is no exit.

About TYPE on a big file: every line that scrolls past the bottom repaints the whole screen from memory, so a thousand-line file is a thousand repaints and you will watch it happen. DOS was no faster. This is the one place where the honest answer is "yes, that is slow, and we know exactly why."

Files and folders

Drive C: is the volume you booted from, reached through the handle the firmware passed in: Loaded Image names the device, the device carries Simple File System, its root is C:. That is the entire storage stack.

It is genuinely reading the medium. Drop a text file onto the stick from your own computer and DIR will list it and TYPE will print it. Nothing in that listing is baked into the executable.
Start with README.TXT. It ships in the root and says roughly what this page does, in 703 bytes.
AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS are on there too. Nothing executes them — there is nothing to execute them — but they are real files with period-correct contents, and one line in one of them quietly explains the blue screen.
CD EFI works. There is a real directory tree under it ending at BOOTX64.EFI, which is the program drawing the screen you are reading it on.
No wildcards. DIR *.TXT ignores the argument and lists everything. A known limit, not a subtle joke.
Names are narrowed to ASCII. Anything outside printable ASCII in a filename becomes ? — a code point above 0x7F is not a CP437 index, and guessing a mapping would be worse than admitting the gap.
Nothing writes. There is no DEL, no COPY, no MD. The read side was built first and the writing side is still a real decision rather than an oversight.

Your own boot splash

The splash is not compiled in. It is C:\LOGO.SYS at the root of the boot volume, and replacing it is the one real customisation the product supports.

Draw at 320×400. That was the Windows 9x convention: a 320×400 bitmap displayed stretched to 640×400, so everything looks half as wide while you are drawing it. Both halves of that convention are honoured here.
Save as an uncompressed BMP at 8, 24 or 32 bits per pixel. A file drawn for the real Windows 9x splash works unchanged.
Copy it over LOGO.SYS on the medium. LOGO.BMP works as a filename too.
Boot, or just type LOGO. If it doesn't appear, LOGO tells you which of the reasons it was.

The bar animation, if you want one: it is not a video, and nothing on screen moves. Windows 9x reserved the top of an 8-bit palette as a colour ramp and rotated those entries, so the highlight travels underneath stationary pixels — which is the entire reason the original bitmap was 8-bit. The repository ships tools/mklogo.py, which quantises artwork to 192 colours, reserves entries 192–255 as a 64-step cyclic ramp, and redraws the bar to use it. A plain truecolour BMP displays fine; it just sits there, like a photograph.

The other operating system

About forty commands from Linux and Unix are recognised at this prompt. None of them do anything, which is the point — but none of them get a generic error either. Each one is declined personally, by name, with an opinion.

We are not printing the list. Finding them is most of the replay value, and a table of punchlines is not a joke, it is a spreadsheet. Start with the one you type without thinking. Package managers, editors, anything with sudo in front of it — somebody has already written you an answer.

Two hints and that is all you get: yes, sudo!! is in there. And win has something to say about the name change.

Ten small tricks

CHARS, then look at rows 0x and 1x. Those are smileys, arrows and card suits, not control characters — CP437 spent its first 32 slots on pictures.
VER tells you the font magnification the code picked for your panel. Resize a VM window, boot again, watch the number change.
Put a text file on the stick from your own machine, boot, TYPE it. That is the moment people believe the filesystem is real.
CD EFI, then CD BOOT, then DIR. You are looking at the program that is drawing the screen you are reading.
TYPE AUTOEXEC.BAT. One of those four lines is why the blue screen is upset with you.
FORMAT C:, and then don't walk away. The pause is deliberate and it is calibrated.
BIN replays the whole boot — splash, blue screen and all — without touching the power button.
Arrow up twice instead of retyping. There is history here; the era it is imitating often had none.
Swap in your own LOGO.SYS, then run LOGO to check it without rebooting.
Try the Linux command you use most. There is a decent chance somebody already wrote you an answer.

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