PC Interrupts : A Programmer's Reference to BIOS, DOS, and Third-Party Calls

by Ralf Brown, Jim Kyle

The first edition of PC Interrupts was the first and only complete reference to all the system calls an IBM programmer needed. Now updated and expanded, PC Interrupts Second Edition provides concise descriptions of all the system calls from many different sources - MS-DOS, the ROM BIOS, and various APIs (application program interfaces) such as Windows 3.x, DESQview, and Advanced Power Management. Over 50 major APIs, dozens of resident utilities, as well as BIOS and MS-DOS services are covered. In addition, this book is the only available source of information on potential conflicts between calls from different APIs.
This book includes complete coverage of the following interrupt services and ROM BIOS; multitaskers/task-switchers; VCPI, DPMI, and DOS extenders; virtual DMA Specification; remote-control software; FAX software; hardware and video; low-level disk and serial I/O; Microsoft Windows; advanced power management; debugging tools; and programming language support.
A companion volume, Network A Programmer's Reference to Network APIs draws together all the information about network system calls, including NetWare 4, NetWare Lite, Windows for Workgroups, and Windows NT.

1210 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Nick Black · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty much useless these days (now that's not at all true regarding assembly language itself, which is absolutely necessary for a serious programmer (not because it need often be written, but because it's necessary for evaluating compilers, debuggers, etc), but there's precious little relevancy left for MS-DOS or PCROM BIOS service routines), but back in the hot Atlanta days as a teenager, slinging wet buckets of democode and hacking thousands of lines of x86 assembly on a daily basis and learning The Game, Ralf Brown's 1100+ page guide was my constant companion. The stains on and inside this book are some of my most tangible connections to those days long ago...man, this makes me want to go map up my VGA memory at 0xa000 and blit some pixels all over it...I remember the intense pride, the pale fire, I felt at 15 when a long week of experimentation brought me to a blazingly fast line-drawing scheme; only four years later would I discover Bresenham's Algorithm by name, and remember those long nights plugging away at 320x256x8 bits of ES-mapped love. 256 colors meant 1 byte per pixel (addressed via, we all remember, (((y << 6) + (y << 2)) + x)...oh man it's been a minute since I've done strength reduction peephole optimizations by hand, lol (BTW, since the introduction of P4 µ-architecture through Pentium-M, NetBurst and Core2, that's actually a de-optimization due to the serialized nature of shift operations -- there's only a single execution unit (which lacks, for that matter, a barrel shifter except on high-end Xeons) with shift capabilities! Don't get F'd in the A, kiddos))...anyway yeah this book was awesome until about 1998, at which point it abruptly depreciated below the cost of its paper.

So it goes. Pooh-te-weet!