THE FRANK AND WALTERS
Trains, Boats And Planes
1993 Europe pressing
One of those great bands I discovered by accident as a kid.
I first heard them on one of my many CMJ samplers; a free CD that came with College Music Journal every month, which was always jam packed with 20 or so new/cool indie & alternative singles. Those CDs were a pivotal part of my music discovery process as a kid.
One had a song on it called āPlenty Timesā by The Frank And Walters. A GREAT SONG.
However, due to the bandās obscurity in North America, I couldnāt find THAT particular album.
I did however find a cassette copy of THIS, which was in a reduced bin. I think I got it for $2.99 back then.
Turns out, THIS was the album for me to find. Such a great, fun bunch of songs, lead off by the stellar āThis Is Not A Songā.
I adore this album.
And I STILL canāt find Beauty Becomes More Than Life on CD.
#vinyl #vinylrecords #vinylcommunity #vinylcollection #retro #vintage #art #music #1990s #90s #90smusic
![āļøAfter Intelās implementation of UEFI was made open source it got picked up by the TianoCore community who make tools such as the TianoCore EDK II.āļø
<https://www.tianocore.org/>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TianoCore_EDK_II>
[Inkbox Software] explains that the UEFI implementation provides boot services and runtime services. Boot services include things such as loading memory management facilities or running other UEFI applications, and runtime services include things like system clock access and system reset. In addition to these services there are many more UEFI protocols that are available.
[Inkbox] tells us that when an x64 CPU boots it jumps to memory address 0xfffffff0 that contains the initialization instructions which will enter protected mode, verify the firmware, initialize the memory, load the storage and graphics drivers, then run the UEFI Boot Manager.
š¾The UEFI Boot Manager will in turn load the appropriate EFI application, such as the firmware settings manager application [the āBIOS settingsā], Windows Boot Manager, or GRUB. āIn this video we make our very own EFI application that the UEFI Boot Manager can be configured to load and run.āš¾
<https://youtu.be/ZFHnbozz7b4>](https://files.mastodon.social/cache/media_attachments/files/115/668/106/590/349/783/original/da9e423516bacb1e.jpeg)
![[ImageSource: Inkbox Software]
āļøProgramming in Assembly without an Operating System.āļø
The system used for development and testing has a AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU and 32GB DDR5 RAM.
<https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/laptop/ryzen/ai-300-series/amd-ryzen-ai-9-hx-370.html>
[Inkbox Software] explains the reason they decided to begin this classic arcade gaming UEFI coding quest. In brief, the assembly coding hero says that they were āso tired of operating systems holding me back,ā and that they wanted their hardware to run a classic game as it was meant to be played. That means āWritten in assembly, without an operating system,ā asserts Inkbox. āThis is total freedom from big tech. Reject OS, Return to metal.ā He shows how to read and write to the console and mentions that he did his testing on QEMU with an image on an external USB thumbdrive.
[Inkbox] goes on to show how to use the system time and date facilities to get the current month. When trying to read nanoseconds from the system clock he ended up needing to refer to the UEFI Specification Release 2.10 [2.11 is latest as of this writing].
š¾[Inkbox] does some arithmetic for timing, uses LocateProtocol to load the graphics output provider, configures an appropriate video mode, writes to the screen using BLT operations and makes the program run on multiple CPU cores [the CPU used has 24]. At last, with some simple graphics programming and mouse input, [Inkbox] manages to get Space Game for x86 to run.š¾](https://files.mastodon.social/cache/media_attachments/files/115/668/106/628/117/731/original/5ac0017784828c6f.jpeg)
![[ImageSource: Inkbox Software]
However, in this video [Inkbox Software] newest hack shows us how to create a computer game that runs directly on computer hardware, without an operating system! He briefly explains what BIOS is, then covers how UEFI replaces it, and talks about the genesis of UEFI from Intel in the late 90s.
<https://youtu.be/ZFHnbozz7b4>
š¾As if assembly coding wasnāt tricky enough, the developer battled through UEFI limitations regarding timings, keyboard input and graphic output. For example, the default UEFI keyboard was described as āabsolutely garbage for game input,ā by [Inkbox], as it has a built-in delay, which is terrible for gaming. So a responsive mouse/joystick control was devised. For graphics, an engine had to be coded to replicate a retro console Picture Processing Unit [PPU].š¾
Such wrinkles were eventually ironed out, though, and the video ends with a demo of the assembly-coded OS-less Zaxxon remake running at a buttery-smooth 128FPS. There is no sound in the game, though.
āļøThis game āwill run on any x86_64 machine,ā says [Inkbox], as long as it supports UEFI. Further details about getting this Zaxxon game up and running are available on the Space Game for x64 GitHub, alongside the code and other resources.āļø
<https://github.com/InkboxSoftware/spacegamex64>](https://files.mastodon.social/cache/media_attachments/files/115/668/106/663/848/423/original/3411b26eb498aeb9.jpeg)
