On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, Stephen Borrill wrote:

> - more interactive menu (I've a tiny curses menu which I could release
> under a BSD licence and use as a basis - anyone know how about cursor
> positioning at this BIOS stage?)

It has been years since I last touched it but at that time I was at least 
able to crash my computer using only an assembler ;-)
I do not know of a generic PC BIOS method of moving the cursor and I do 
not think it exists. Instead there is the BIOS for the graphics cards.
Back in the day we had fun probing for Hercules/CGA/EGA cards but today it 
should be safe to assume VGA. If memory servers me right the VGA BIOS was 
backwards compatible for the simple text functions. On a VGA card which 
provides the old IBM VGA BIOS interface you should use function 02h.
You can find a very good reference at:
http://www.versalogic.com/support/downloads/pdf/69030bg.pdf

Som evil genius suggested full serial support as well. Now we are at the 
references I stumbled over a nice short VT100 recently:
ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/afs%2Fcs.cmu.edu%2Fuser%2Fralf%2Fpub/vt100/

Rgds,
Claus

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