image-render-bootloader

A bootloader designed to render an image in 256-color VGA mode.

Uses Floyd-Steinberg dithering to convert a regular RGB image into the data that can be displayed in 256-color VGA mode.

Usage

To build the bootloader in the easiest way, just follow the instructions below. You can do it the manual way with an assembler and GIMP but then, you're on your own.

Installing dependencies

For Windows, you can install scoop and use it to install the necessary packages:

scoop install nasm make python

As for Linux, all of the packages should be in your default package manager. Here's an example for Debian-based distros:

sudo apt install nasm make python3

After that, use pip to install Pillow:

pip install pillow

If you want to run the bootloader, you need to install QEMU as well, which can be done with either scoop install qemu or sudo apt install qemu, depending on your OS.

Building

Before building the bootloader, you will need to do a couple of things.

1. Download the image to be displayed, it can be anything you like. Just remember that the color palette is limited to 256 colors, thus some colors might not look that good.
2. Open the Makefile and edit variables according to your configuration. The one you will most likely need to change is IMAGE_PATH, which should be set to the path of the image you downloaded in the previous step.
3. Simply run make in the root directory of the project.

This will build the bootloader in the build/bootloader.bin file. If you installed QEMU and want to run the bootloader, you can do so by running make run in the root directory of the project.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.