It feels like a thousand centuries ago, but way back in 2006 I was able to hack together an x86 assembly tutorial intended for 3.5 inch floppies onto a bootable “El Torito” CD-ROM, to print terrifying messages on some of my unsuspecting roommate’s machines.
Mostly hilarious messages like:
Boot device not found. / No bootable device. / Press any key to retry...
Basically, you just had to repack the tutorial’s floppy disk sector into a CD-ROM sector with a hex editor. Burning your own bootable CD-R felt pretty futuristic back then.
It feels like a thousand centuries ago, but way back in 2006 I was able to hack together an x86 assembly tutorial intended for 3.5 inch floppies onto a bootable “El Torito” CD-ROM, to print terrifying messages on some of my unsuspecting roommate’s machines.
Mostly hilarious messages like:
This was the assembly tutorial: http://viralpatel.net/taj/operating-system-tutorial.php
This is CD-ROM specification: http://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/motherboards/desktop/sb/specscdrom.pdf
Basically, you just had to repack the tutorial’s floppy disk sector into a CD-ROM sector with a hex editor. Burning your own bootable CD-R felt pretty futuristic back then.
Great. I’m going to try it this weekend.