DOS ain't dead

I just finished up lDebug release 1.

The release primarily includes the manual (HTML is the preferred format, text and PDF available too), and five executables: lDebug (86 Mode only) and lDebugX (DPMI capable), both of each either uncompressed or lzip LZMA compressed, and instsect set up to install a boot sector loader for FAT12, FAT16, or FAT32 which can load any of the debugger executables as a bootable kernel. Further executables include LZ4 or Exomizer 3 compressed executables if one prefers those. The lzip LZMA compression was selected as the default method based on it compressing to the smallest resulting files.

All executables and loaders are supposed to work on anything down to 8088/8086 level machines. The loaders (boot sectors as well as the iniload stage embedded in the executables) prefer to use LBA access if available, and fall back to CHS access else.

The main sources (included in the releases) amount to 43k lines:

source$ cntlines -q *.asm *.MAC *.mac
Files:          23
Bytes:          976576
Total lines:    43010
 Blanks:        4660
 Comment only:  8834
 Actual code:   29516

Several other source repos are required for assembly. All of those are available from my Mercurial repos. The assembler used was NASM version 2.15.03 (its preprocessor is extensively used). Complete building requires a C compiler to build several supporting applications.

My website contains links to the repo, releases, and manual on the web (always the most recent one), or you can directly load the lzipped tarball (1.6 MiB) or the zipfile (5.5 MiB).

To get a sense of what is new since I forked FreeDOS Debug 1.13 you can read the blurb on my website or at the beginning of the manual. For more in depth descriptions of most of the new features you'll have to read the manual. For a quick start, run one of the executables and enter the ? command to get the main online help. (This should be paged according to the amount of rows on screen.) At the end of the main online help, further online help pages are referenced.

lDebug is free software, primarily under the Fair License, though the original FreeDOS Debug's MIT license and the 2-Clause BSD license (transitionally used for lDebug) are offered as alternatives too.

(I intend to repackage the release for a FreeDOS installer compatible zipfile at a later time. Meanwhile FreeDOS users can unpack this release manually.)

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l

Looks interesting! I look forward to trying it out.

Andrew

> I intend to repackage the release for a FreeDOS installer compatible
> zipfile at a later time.

Done. Though pending feedback perhaps I will redo this soon.

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l

I just want to say I appreciate your efforts on this, and look forward to a symbolic version. Symbols are one big reason I still use the A86 debugger (even when I use the NASM assembler), and have also experimented a little with 386SWAT which makes some provisions for symbols. A symbolic debugger makes troubleshooting programs MUCH easier.