Real Time Computer Emulator

overview

This project is a real time emulator for a computer containing a cpu, mouse, keyboard, screen, (floppy) disk driver and BIOS firmware. The emulator implements all the necessary internals and functionalities to simulate the real life behavior of a computer machine.

Once started, the emulator would boot the machine up via the reset vector and firmware, and launch a window displaying the computer's screen output. When the window is in focus, the emulator would listen to the input of the mouse and keyboard like regular hardware interrupts.

The implemented components include:

• full Intel i386 (x86 ISA) processor, both real mode and protected mode.
• Mouse
• Keyboard
• PS/2 controller (for the mouse and keyboard)
• VGA for screen graphics, both text mode and graphics mode
• Floppy disk driver
• small BIOS firmware

The emulator is currently capable of loading small operating systems, provided as floppy disk files.

This project also contains implementation for two small, sample operating systems that can be complied and tested quickly against the emulator.

build

to build the emulator, execute the build.sh script at the rot directory of the project. this would create a directory build which would contain:

• reset_vector.bin: a file contain the reset vector machine code for the processor
• bios.bin: a file containing the firmware code for the processor
• emulator: the emulator file itself. be sure to execute it at the same directory as the reset vector file and the bios file

the project also contains sample operating systems to be tested on the emulator. execute the build_sample_os.sh script with one argument:

• small_os: this build a small os with graphics (sourced samples/small_ls)
• tiny_os: this build a tiny, minimalist OS which just outputs text to the screen using BIOS (sourced samples/tiny_os)

to clean all build, execute the clean.sh script