The BIOS Data Area

Layout of the BIOS Data Area at 0x0040:0x0000.

Offset Size (bytes) Description
0x00 2 Base I/O address of serial port 1
0x02 2 Base I/O address of serial port 2
0x04 2 Base I/O address of serial port 3
0x06 2 Base I/O address of serial port 4
0x08 2 Base I/O address of parallel port 1
0x0A 2 Base I/O address of parallel port 2
0x0C 2 Base I/O address of parallel port 3
0x0E 2 Base I/O address of parallel port 4
0x10 2 Equipment word
0x12 1 Manufacturing test data
0x13 2 Memory size in Kb
0x15 2 Manufacturing test data
0x17 2 Keyboard status flag
0x19 1 Alt + Numpad data
0x1A 2 Keyboard buffer head
0x1C 2 Keyboard buffer tail
0x1E 32 Keyboard buffer
0x3E 11 Disk controller information
0x49 30 Graphics adapter information
0x67 5 Unknown
0x6C 4 Counter
0x70 1 Counter 24 hour overflow
0x71 1 Keyboard control flag
0x72 2 Soft reset flag
0x74 4 Disk controller information
0x78 4 Parallel timeout values
0x7C 4 Serial timeout values
0x80 2 Start of PS/2 keyboard buffer
0x82 2 End of PS/2 keyboard buffer
0x84 7 Graphics controller information
0x8B 13 Disk controller information
0x96 2 Keyboard status flag
0x98 4 Pointer to user flag
0x9C 4 User wait count
0xA0 1 User wait flag
0xA1 7 Reserved for network adapters
0xA8 4 Graphics adapter information
0xAC 68 Reserved
0xF0 16 Inter-application communication area

 


BIOS data located at 0xffff:0x0000.

Offset Size Description
0x00 5 far jmp instruction to begin POST
0x05 8 ROM BIOS date in ASCII
0x0C 2 Unused
0x0E 1 IBM computer type code