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I did a “lecture”/“workshop” about this at work today. 16-bit DOS, real mode. 💾 Pretty cool and the audience (devs and sysadmins) seemed quite interested. 🥳
- People used the Intel docs to figure out the instruction encodings.
- Then they wrote a little DOS program that exits with a return code and they used uhex in DOSBox to do that. Yes, we wrote a COM file manually, no Assembler involved. (Many of them had never used DOS before.)
- DEBUG from FreeDOS was used to single-step through the program, showing what it does.
- This gets tedious rather quickly, so we switched to SVED from SvarDOS for writing the rest of the program in Assembly language. nasm worked great for us.
- At the end, we switched to BIOS calls instead of DOS syscalls to demonstrate that the same binary COM file works on another OS. Also a good opportunity to talk about bootloaders a little bit.
- (I think they even understood the basics of segmentation in the end.)
The 8086 / 16-bit real-mode DOS is a great platform to explain a lot of the fundamentals without having to deal with OS semantics or executable file formats.
Now that was a lot of fun. 🥳 It’s very rare that we do something like this, sadly. I love doing this kind of low-level stuff.
@lyse
> They're all talks, not real hands-on trainings like you did.
I love listening to good, well-structured talks. Problem is, not everybody is a good speaker and many screw it up. 🥴 I’m certainly not a great speaker, which is why I gravitate more towards “workshops”, in the hopes that people ask questions and discussions arise. Doesn’t always work out. 🤣 At the very least, I almost always have some other person connect to the projector/beamer/screenshare and then they do the stuff – this avoids me being *wwwwaaaaaaaaayyyy* too fast.
We are usually drowned in stress and tight deadlines, hence events like today are super rare … We used to do it more often until ~10 years ago.
> Once a year the security guys organize a really great hacking event, though.
Oh dear, I’d love to participate in that. 🤯 That sounds like a lot of fun. (Why don’t we do this?!)~