Examples like Famicom Disk System, Playstation 1, 2...
Do they use BIOS or firmware? Or BIOS = firmware??
Through fifth generation (the PlayStation), there wasn't much of a distinction between BIOS and firmware that I'm aware of. The Xbox and GameCube were the first machines I know of to have separate levels of firmware on separate chips. In these machines, the BIOS is a mask ROM on the CPU or GPU die, while the firmware is on a larger, slower flash chip and is decrypted into RAM by a program in the BIOS.
I'd thought on the meaning of the term BIOS, Basic Input Output System. Don't know about FDS BIOS, but I guess it is what it is, routines to access disk drive, i.e. basic input/output. For Playstation it is more than just this, it has Memory Card manager, CD player, etc.
Definitions, meh. Some systems with a cartridge slot directly from it. Most others with or without a cartridge slot have internal ROM that they boot from, which then hands control off to the game on the storage medium (loading it into memory if it's a non-cartridge medium).
I'd use the term firmware to refer to the ROM, since it indicates that it's firmly in memory even when power is removed, unlike things in (non-battery-backed-up, tepples) RAM.
If once the game is running it makes further use of the ROM, it'd probably be called a BIOS. The benefit (and curse) is that it can be updated even after the game has been fixed on the storage medium.
Specifically in the case of computers and video game consoles: I'd say they're the same thing.
In spinning hard drives, the firmware isn't very firm: it's often stored on disk, in a section you can't address from the host. I guess you might still call it a BIOS, though.
In generic microcontrollers, the firmware isn't a BIOS.
I'd show more love for the terms boot ROM/bootstrap/boot loader. For example, I consider the Gameboy startup program to be a boot ROM, not a BIOS as some people call it.
tepples wrote:
Through fifth generation (the PlayStation), there wasn't much of a distinction between BIOS and firmware that I'm aware of. The Xbox and GameCube were the first machines I know of to have separate levels of firmware on separate chips. In these machines, the BIOS is a mask ROM on the CPU or GPU die, while the firmware is on a larger, slower flash chip and is decrypted into RAM by a program in the BIOS.
As a fan of xbox1, I wish to clarify: Ignoring things like the firmware that exists on the DVD-ROM, IDE hdd or perhaps the PIC micro-controller, there is not really more than one BIOS/firmware. There is a very small, 512 byte block of code that is part of the MCP-X (southbridge) (because MS thought no one would figure that out), but other than that the xbox's BIOS is all on the TSOP flash. (Except for the last revision of xbox, which used some kind of mask ROM). This does get expanded and copied to RAM, which is a separate level I suppose, but at this point it is a kernel.
http://hackspot.net/XboxBlog/?p=1
In the devices I make I call them all Boot ROMs. Firmware term I have never really used and BIOS I consider something useful to the programs running on the machine past boot. Boot ROM still covers all the starting up aspects.