After learning the Hydro Thunder arcade cabinets use the Phar Lap TNT Embedded ToolSuite RTOS (and that the Monitor just loads PE files), I decided to have a go at playing around with the upgrade floppy to see if it would boot a PE file I wrote myself.
I got it working fairly quickly, and I played around with it some until deciding to clean it up.
All the code here, besides the ETS floppy (ofc) is under the MIT License.
You will need mingw-w64 tools and NASM.
make will build the EXE and copy it onto a copy of the boot floppy.
make test will test that floppy in the Bochs emulator. I'd use QEMU but the boot loader literally doesn't work.
The TNT RTOS seems to be structured like so:
- Monitor (loader & seems to provide very basic bootstrap "service calls")
- Application (PE file)
- TNT Kernel libraries
- Runtime (unpacking compressed ROMDATA/such)
- Multitasking
- Realtime (seemingly optional, weirdly enough)
- Filesystem
- TCP/IP stack (of note; used by Hydro Thunder)
- Win32 API source compatibility (for the most part)
- TNT Kernel libraries
- Application (PE file)
This repository basically only reimplements the Application PE file, however one could in theory write a replacement kernel with modern code for fun. I kinda wanna do that honestly.