(I saw one of my previous posts didn't actually answer the "where's the BIOS file used by simics?" question, so I renamed the previous one and am pulling that question out and making it standalone here.)
I can see the BIOS code for a default "targets\qsp-x86\firststeps.simics" invocation by just stepping through the debugger from the start. But if I want to see the full binary, is there a specific file somewhere I can look at?
Upon searching around, I found the following folder:
C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Local\Programs\Simics\simics-qsp-x86-6.0.44\targets\qsp-x86\images
Inside that folder are the following 3 files:
SIMICSX58IA32X64_1_0_0_bp_r.fd
SIMICSX58IA32X64-ahci.fd
spi-flash. bin
Both SIMICSX58IA32X64_1_0_0_bp_r. fd and SIMICSX58IA32X64-ahci.fd have UEFI filevolume headers at the start, and a seeming BIOS entry point at the end. The spi-flash. bin seems to have a placeholder of the flash descriptor which would go at the start of the flash, but is mostly empty. So I believe Intel basically either stitches these together in memory, or possibly just uses the spi-flash. bin to allow for "soft strap" configuration or somesuch (since it's a virtual MCH/ICH anyway.)