Chinese 8088-based laptop system with pirated 8088 BIOS

[NeXT]

You are comparing something one did for free in his sparetime with something that was sold commercially by a huge company. If both is the same for you when it comes to "piracy", you have a really odd way of thinking.

Key word: free.
Who cares about the copyright when someone just posts all their work online? It's uncompiled. It's all commented....even the list of known issues. Just right there. All in one place.
Congrats Sergey you played yourself. You posted countless weeks/months/years of your time developing a PC compatible BIOS online for anyone to use and for free and expect a crummy little textfile to save you when an eastern nation comes looking? You can cry it's stolen work but you voluntarily threw your work into the wind.
I've had my work stolen. I know other people on this forum who have seen their work surface with someone else's name on it, be it some rando or or some major outfit like Honeywell.
Do we care? Universally, no. Should we care? Possibly. We put our works out for free and the internet does what the internet does best.

They could of used ANY of the other mediocre PC compatible BIOS's which would of been even more grey area (regardless if they were cleanroom developed or blatent copies) and nobody would of cared because again as others have made it clear in this thread, there's no piracy like casual piracy. But this BIOS. No this one is special. It's free, but somehow also stolen.
Even LGR was pretty casual about the other portable using an AMI BIOS. It got a one-line mention and that was it. Was that licensed from American Megatrends? Probably not. Would we be losing it if that had a copy of Sergey's BIOS? Probably.

Both were pirated. Either complain both were stolen or shut up. (not you specifically)

And yes, no one gives a sh*t about pirated copies of DOS/Windows these days. MS has made its money with that long time ago.

Doesn't matter. At least TRY to respect the copyright and licensing. Doesn't matter who I pull up as a vendor, be it Microsoft, Autodesk or even Apogee/3D Realms titles being redistributed in their non-shareware form. Stuff you can't post here because it falls under piracy.
I was reverse-engineering the ROM for the Lisa QuickBoot nearly a decade ago. That's an add-on for a board that was for a machine that's been obsolete for over 25 years. I still got thwacked with legal action by the registered owner and backed off as a result. That ROM made it's money long long ago but that doesn't mean it's cool to assume the copyright owner doesn't care and as a result I got a phonecall. Just because it's an old product for an obsolete platform does not mean they're going to ignore infringement. They are aware it's happening. It's just not a threat to them in its current form but if they need to set a precedent, they will come knocking.

Again, being super casual about pirating from everyone else, but being children because someone didn't get their name in the credits. It's not stolen. It's par for the course.



Edit: It's 3am and somehow I'm both saying it's cool for this BIOS to be stolen while saying piracy is bad. I don't even know where this conversation is going anymore.
Whatever. It's a name. The code is good and that's really all that matters. Be proud that someone else also appreciated your work that they wanted to use it instead of screeching like a toddler in Toys R Us because they didn't use it exactly how you intended.

 

[maxtherabbit]

Pirating commercial software does NOT remove the author's name from the credits. That's what you're totally oblivious to. It's a totally different issue, doing it for the glory vs doing it for the money.

 

[stepleton]

Both were pirated. Either complain both were stolen or shut up. (not you specifically)

I can't speak for @sergey but I think one problem here is that we're mixing up two separate categories of things:

1. Payment, possession, ownership
2. Customs of acknowledgement, credit, "kudos"

Since Charles Dickens has been dead for 153 years or so, the law (which only cares about the first category) says I do him and his heirs no harm by publishing and promoting A Tale of Two Cities by @stepleton . Most people would still find this to be in poor taste! Some might even say that I'm "stealing" things, even though the text, being in the public domain, is literally impossible to steal.

So the offence must be against the second category. It's up to you to decide whether you think it's a valid offence. I think it is, and I think it's applicable here. Abandonware piracy violates #1 but not #2. The 8088 laptop maker violated #2 but not #1, at least not in a way that matters much. I think our community tends to care much more about #2 and much less about #1.

(It's easy to mix these things up because we seem to learn from a very young age that nothing is ever gained without some kind of exchange --- not even kudos. But I can demonstrate that it doesn't have to be this way: @sergey , I've never used or even downloaded your BIOS, but it seems pretty cool --- nice job.)

I was reverse-engineering the ROM for the Lisa QuickBoot nearly a decade ago.

This came up recently on LisaList and the owner still cares.

screeching like a toddler in Toys R Us

nobody is doing this

 

[ajacocks]

Folks, let’s keep the discussion civil.

- Alex

 

[sergey]

It does what appears to be a 0 - 640k memory test during boot now.

It doesn't show anything except of "no entry" sign. Permissions are wrong?

 

[sergey]

Key word: free.
Who cares about the copyright when someone just posts all their work online? It's uncompiled. It's all commented....even the list of known issues. Just right there. All in one place.
Congrats Sergey you played yourself. You posted countless weeks/months/years of your time developing a PC compatible BIOS online for anyone to use and for free and expect a crummy little textfile to save you when an eastern nation comes looking? You can cry it's stolen work but you voluntarily threw your work into the wind.

I don't see developing open source projects as throwing them to the wind. Surely, I am not looking to make any profit. I develop them because I enjoy the process. There are at least three good reasons I license my work under the GPL license or similar in spirit CERN-OHL-S open hardware license:
1. The source code and design files remain accessible. If one wants to contribute to the development, borrow some ideas, or just wants to see how the project works, they can easily do that.
2. These licenses require redistribution of the modified code and design files. This is comes useful particularly in the case of Book8088 and similar hobbyist-oriented projects. The availability of the modified source makes it is possible to improve the code further, and you're not just stuck with a black box.
3. Yes, it feels nice to get an attribution or an occasional critique

Since I am the copyright holder, it is up to me how to enforce it. I can't comment why others would or would not enforce their copyrights and licenses.

And again, in this particular case there is nothing that would have prevented Book8088 designers to supply the 8088 BIOS in a license-compliant way. It seems to be the case of general disregard to license terms and copyrights, either intentional or just a causal, uninformed, culture-specific behavior.

 

[keenerb]

It doesn't show anything except of "no entry" sign. Permissions are wrong?

That's weird. I'll re-upload.

 

[vwestlife]

I believe Microsoft did complain about the China DOS Union who had stripped the DOS part out of Windows 98, renamed it "MS-DOS 7.1" and offered it as a free download, and got their web site shut down... but that was around 20 years ago, when Windows 98 was still a supported and commonly used operating system.

And yes, I do think it's hypocritical for people to complain about these products "stealing" Sergey's BIOS, but not blink an eye at them coming with pirated copies of MS-DOS and Windows. Especially these days when FreeDOS has gotten good enough to be functionally identical to the real thing, and anyone interested in these systems is going to have their own copies (legal or pirated) of MS/PC DOS and Windows on hand to install if they wanted.

Plus, the free/open source software community doesn't exactly have clean hands in this regard, either. JWZ, author of xScreenSaver, got tired of Debian Linux coming with a very old version of his program, causing people to constantly write to him about problems that would've been fixed if they had simply been using a newer version of it. So he added a warning message to the program reminding users to install the latest version, and then Debian users complained about constantly seeing the warning message... but instead of Debian including a newer version of xScreenSaver to avoid the warning, they kept using the old version and removed the warning from his code:

I would like Debian to stop shipping XScreenSaver

If any of you reading this have decision-making ability along those lines, I would appreciate your assistance in making this happen. If you're wondering why: they are still shipping a version of my software that I released in 2014. Since that's roughly a decade in software years, it recently...

www.jwz.org

 

[Caluser2000]

I've still got around 85% of software I purchased right through the '90s and then some on the way to the present day. No need to search for it on the interweb.

FreeDos just doesn't "do it for me" personally. Especially 286s down....

 

[jscipione]

I have a Book 8088 (I’m a sucker for anything 8088) is there anything I can do to help? Provide a ROM dump? Test with Sergey’s BIOS ROM? I was trying to see if I could get Plantronics mode to run since it seems to have 32k of VRAM (HY638256) but the CGA chip seems to only be able to address 16k. Edit: HY638256 is the 32k SRAM chip used in my unit.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

I was trying to see if I could get Plantronics mode to run since it seems to have 32k of VRAM (HY638256) but the CGA chip seems to only be able to address 16k. Edit: HY638256 is the 32k SRAM chip used in my unit.

Off the top of my head I think a Plantronics card accesses its memory 16 bits at a time. (IE, its 32K of RAM it two parallel 8-bit banks.) Granted the HY638256 SRAM is so fast it probably wouldn't be a problem for it to do two separate latched fetches for each character window, but unless the creator already did it you're going to have to reprogram the CPLD it's using to emulate CGA to make it happen.(*)

(* This is also assuming they actually wired up the last access line of the SRAM, it's possible they left it hanging.)

 

[jscipione]

Checkit seems to see an additional 16k of memory at BC00h right after the 16k of CGA Video RAM which makes me feel like the RAM is made available and so it is possible, but Plantronics mode must need some more stuff that I don’t have.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Checkit seems to see an additional 16k of memory at BC00h right after the 16k of CGA Video RAM which makes me feel like the RAM is made available and so it is possible, but Plantronics mode must need some more stuff that I don’t have.

FWIW, the original IBM CGA card doesn't fully decode its video RAM so the same 16K is visible twice at both B8000 and BC000. I'm not sure of Check-It's behavior on, say, an original 5150, but I do know that on my Tandy 1000 EX and HX, which emulate this double-mapping, Check-It misidentifies this shadow as 16K of high RAM. A way you can tell if it's a shadow or not is hit "ENTER" to get more detail; if Checkit shows you a hex dump of the area and you see the contents are the start of the text buffer you'll know it's emulating an original CGA "properly" and it's unlikely the rest of the VRAM is actually accessible.

I guess another possibility if it's *not* a shadow could be emulating the 400 line monochrome "SuperCGA" mode that was in machines like some old Toshiba/Zenith/Compaq laptops?

 

[jscipione]

FWIW, the original IBM CGA card doesn't fully decode its video RAM so the same 16K is visible twice at both B8000 and BC000. I'm not sure of Check-It's behavior on, say, an original 5150, but I do know that on my Tandy 1000 EX and HX, which emulate this double-mapping, Check-It misidentifies this shadow as 16K of high RAM. A way you can tell if it's a shadow or not is hit "ENTER" to get more detail; if Checkit shows you a hex dump of the area and you see the contents are the start of the text buffer you'll know it's emulating an original CGA "properly" and it's unlikely the rest of the VRAM is actually accessible.

I guess another possibility if it's *not* a shadow could be emulating the 400 line monochrome "SuperCGA" mode that was in machines like some old Toshiba/Zenith/Compaq laptops?

I think you’re right it looks like there is a text buffer there, so that could simply be an artifact of the CGA implementation and not additional 16k of video RAM, too bad.

 

[the3dfxdude]

I believe Microsoft did complain about the China DOS Union who had stripped the DOS part out of Windows 98, renamed it "MS-DOS 7.1" and offered it as a free download, and got their web site shut down... but that was around 20 years ago, when Windows 98 was still a supported and commonly used operating system.

And yes, I do think it's hypocritical for people to complain about these products "stealing" Sergey's BIOS, but not blink an eye at them coming with pirated copies of MS-DOS and Windows. Especially these days when FreeDOS has gotten good enough to be functionally identical to the real thing, and anyone interested in these systems is going to have their own copies (legal or pirated) of MS/PC DOS and Windows on hand to install if they wanted.

Plus, the free/open source software community doesn't exactly have clean hands in this regard, either. JWZ, author of xScreenSaver, got tired of Debian Linux coming with a very old version of his program, causing people to constantly write to him about problems that would've been fixed if they had simply been using a newer version of it. So he added a warning message to the program reminding users to install the latest version, and then Debian users complained about constantly seeing the warning message... but instead of Debian including a newer version of xScreenSaver to avoid the warning, they kept using the old version and removed the warning from his code:

I would like Debian to stop shipping XScreenSaver

If any of you reading this have decision-making ability along those lines, I would appreciate your assistance in making this happen. If you're wondering why: they are still shipping a version of my software that I released in 2014. Since that's roughly a decade in software years, it recently...

www.jwz.org

The China DOS is kind of an apt comparison. I was thinking about pointing out that MS-DOS 1.0-2.0 is mostly open source and thought a comparison would be like stripping out Microsoft's authorship and calling MS-DOS your own under your own license, because that is sort of what happened here.

Sergey just wants pressure on them to do the right thing. I am thankful for all critique, how the hardware design is not good and, including Sergey's, which highlights potential dishonesty. I do not want anything to do with people that are dishonest because they cannot be trusted. It can be fixed, and we can move on.

The comparison of Sergey's situation to JWZ's rant is kind of strange. For one, Sergey's authorship removal was done silently which appears as an attempt of deception. In the open source community, bug reports, and changelogs were published on the package in question. This is not the same.

Also I don't think JWZ actually cared about the screen, but unfortunately he made his rather late rant towards Debian concerning their response to the screen. I remembered something on the Slackware's forum about removing this a long time ago, and I checked. Slackware's Patrick Volkerding already told JWZ he was stripping it out of Slackware in 2014, 2 years before the Debian rant, and JWZ didn't rant about that happening on his blog. Is this really a situation about changing code and removing nag screens? I don't think so:

Fri Aug 1 21:13:18 UTC 2014
patches/packages/xscreensaver-5.29-i486-1_slack14.1.txz: Upgraded.
Disabled nag screen that says "This version of XScreenSaver is very old!
Please upgrade!" when the age of the software exceeds 12 months.

Wed Jan 13 00:01:23 UTC 2016
patches/packages/xscreensaver-5.34-i486-1_slack14.1.txz: Upgraded.
I promised jwz that I'd keep this updated in -stable when I removed (against
his wishes) the nag screen that complains if a year has passed since that
version was released. So, here's the latest one.

And indeed Slackware patched out the nag screen for years, and frequently updated it, until version XScreenSaver about version 6, it seems like JWZ removed the nag screen himself, so the patch was dropped. It seems like Slackware met JWZ's wishes AND removed the nag screen.

Is this really about respect issues in this case about a piece of code? No I think JWZ just was trying to suggest a better update policy concerning Debian, but it caught the Debian people off guard when the pop up appeared and then he started cursing at them in their bug report and blogged about it, so the reason went over their heads. Debian and Slackware handle updates differently, and based on Debian's maintenance policy, it makes it hard for them to process some updates. I do understand JWZ's issues being an upstream provider to Debian as I've had to deal with them too and their very old packaging of my stuff, but I think it could have been communicated a bit better.

 

[Malc]

I have a Book 8088

I'm Curious, Has yours got a USB port ?, In one of the photo's i saw it had a USB driver installed.

 

[jscipione]

I'm Curious, Has yours got a USB port ?, In one of the photo's i saw it had a USB driver installed.

Yes , it has a USB port, but unfortunately the only thing you can use it for right now is a USB stick for more storage. It would be more useful if you could plug a mouse into it, because there’s currently no way to use a mouse except if you plug a serial card into the ISA expansion ribbon cable out the back.

 

[Malc]

Yes , it has a USB port, but unfortunately the only thing you can use it for right now is a USB stick for more storage. It would be more useful if you could plug a mouse into it, because there’s currently no way to use a mouse except if you plug a serial card into the ISA expansion ribbon cable out the back.

Yeah the CH375B chip is mass storage only, I like the idea of the ISA expansion ribbon cable out the back though.

 

[HeathenUK]

Yeah the CH375B chip is mass storage only, I like the idea of the ISA expansion ribbon cable out the back though.

The CH375B supports wider USB host modes, including HID, just not as flexibly at the CH376. So you could in theory use it for a mouse. I'm not sure if FreddyV's source is available? I know he's moved on to projects that use the Pi Pico on the ISA bus for a wider range of uses (see also ISABlaster and DirtyRat).

In other news and not exactly a surprise, swapping the NMOS and HMOS chips on the Book8088 with CMOS replacements significantly increases battery life.

G

 

[ajacocks]

Welcome to the forum @HeathenUK !

Interesting experiment on the chip swap.

- Alex