In early June, we explored a method to play Doom in the BIOS, courtesy of the Coreboot project and its compatibility with payloads. However, there are other things that can take the place of the Doomguy, for example... Windows 3.1. With that in mind, we arrived at the blog of "sdomi", who shared details about Windows 3.1 Flash Edition, a hacked and compressed to the bone version that takes up less than three megabytes, and boots almost instantly...
The ThinkPad series of IBM / Lenovo laptops is one of the most appreciated by enthusiasts, and the reason is simple: we can do fabulous things with that hardware. From complete screen upgrades to new, custom motherboards, honestly there seems to be no limits for ThinkPad machines.
We must also add the use of alternative BIOSes, thanks to the efforts of projects like Coreboot and Libreboot. The most interesting thing is that Coreboot uses payloads, and with a little creativity, it is possible to install... other programs. Say, Windows 3.1?
Windows 3.1 Flash Edition: Pure Madness in 2.88 MB
This work belongs to "sdomi", who after struggling with a friend's ThinkPads to install Coreboot and Libreboot, decided to hack his own ThinkPad X200. In general, the SeaBIOS payload (a miniature implementation of an x86 BIOS) takes up about 1 MB of the 8 MB available on the chip, and the original idea was to use the remaining 7 MB to load Windows.
The good news is that SeaBIOS has partial support for booting from Flash, creating a virtual floppy drive with a maximum capacity of 2.88 MB (the famous "ED" disks). The bad news is that SeaBIOS started throwing errors when trying to extend that capacity. Besides that hard limit of 2.88 MB, "sdomi" also struggled with an incomplete VESA mode, and the solution was to add a VGA Option ROM to Coreboot, compatible with the X200.
A modified SVGA driver (VMWare came to the rescue here) and a careful selection of software later (which includes the Calmira environment), Windows 3.1 Flash Edition was ready for action. Unfortunately, the ThinkPad X200 does not have audio drivers prior to XP (I've suffered this myself with other hardware), so the only sound available is generated via the speaker. The last step is a classic compression nightmare to get everything into 2.88 MB: only 13 kilobytes remained.
Official site: Click here
