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Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Migrating AMIBIOS 1B Module Utilities Source Code to GitHub

A long time ago (read: 10+ years) I created some small, mostly BIOS-related, utilities and dumped the source code on the web. I even forgot that they're there in my website (https://sites.google.com/site/pinczakko/source-code). Fortunately, over time, some people come across those source code and found the source code useful for them. Some of them asked question or give suggestions. Therefore, I decided to gradually move the code over to GitHub and update the code as well, so that the code would still be compile-able with present day toolchain.

Some of the utilities are small utilities to parse, extract and modifies AMIBIOS8 1B (main) module--akin to original.tmp in (legacy) Award BIOS. You need to use AMI Module Management Tool (MMTool) to obtain the 1B module from AMI BIOS binary file.

The utilities source code are now in Github: https://github.com/pinczakko/AMIBIOS8_1B_Utils. The code is POSIX compliant. I haven't test it against Mingw-w64 cross compiler to produce Windows binary--I recall that I used mingw (32-bit) on Windows to write the code back then. The code compiled just fine in Arch Linux gcc toolchain as of July 2017. Therefore, the code can produce Linux/Unix executable just fine.

I don't really remember the exact time when I wrote the utilities. But, it was wrtitten in 2010 and used in one of my project(s) in that year for one of my client(s). Those projects requires AMIBIOS8 binary modification. That's the reason I wrote the utility.

For the time being, feel free to play with it and modify it. I plan to add support for cross compilation with Mingw-w64 later on. If you tested the code on real AMIBIOS8 binary, I'd like to know the result ;-).

Anyway, the code is GPL v2-licensed (kudos to Gabor Stefanik for reminding me to put proper licensing note).