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OMF records (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 16.02.2012, 08:00

>> until I stumbled across 1.2
> I followed your d/l link to i guess the older version?
No, it was for 1.2 alright, just wanted to make clear that 1.1 seems to be more popular on some sites for dumb reasons (Simtel, Garbo).

> Anyway my guess is that his compiler was probably either built with tasm but linked
> with ms link, or it was built with a customised version of borland pascal/c (which
> came with rtl source) which in this instance was modified to build the EXE's (which
> lack the usual pascal or C rtl bits/strings/sys vars). That said he could have used
> Turbo Pascal/C without the rtl source by using various tools to replace/reduce the
> size of the rtl which exist, however I expect the later is less likely as even
> harder to use than rtl src.
Anything's possible. Perhaps he used a lot of inline code bits or binary patched it, who knows.

> Anyway this is all academic but as I spent a few mins looking at the files I thought
> you might be vaguely interested in the above.
Definitely interested but don't know the answer. There was a post on the 'Net somewhere once where someone explicitly said something like he had written it in Turbo Pascal, but I can't find it now. :-/

> > > > compiler circa 1991. So old, in fact, that it was expected to be
> used
> > > with
> > > > MS LINK, which at the time (MS-DOS 4.0?) came bundled with the OS.
> Yup along with exe2bin, edlin and other such delights. Things started to
> be dumbed down with v5 when he was introduced and dosshell (yuk).
I don't know why they ever removed some of that stuff later on. I don't understand companies that give you downgrades with impunity.

> > QLINK (recently GPL'd) works if you use /OMF:IGN ("ignore") but needs
> DPMI
> Hmm, not familar but will check it out. Have you tried alink which may or
> may not support omf (i think it may) however so many linkers hard to
> remember,
QLINK DPMIONE 386SWAT

I think I did try ALINK (though perhaps not 1.7 beta, latest?), but it also didn't work. Frustrating.

> > All I know is that it seems ludicrous to have so many linkers
> > not handle the format,
> Thinking about it I wonder if it may be more to do with of possible bugs in
> the oberon obj files themselves, have you run them through a obj dumper?
Briefly, barely, yes, (e.g. OpenWatcom's DMPOBJ.EXE), but it didn't show anything obvious. Most linkers do indeed mention that they choke on the 70H record (aka, "obsolete" REGINT). Frustrating that somebody thought it was wise to let "standard" TIS 1.1 linkers choke on pre-existing OMF formats. Again, another downgrade for no reason.

> > (There are other Oberon compilers but none that target 16-bit DOS,
> AFAICT.
> > Color me nostalgic.)
> I think that's a good thing :)
I know of a 286 shareware one, Edipar, but none others for 16-bit. The original Oberon was on a Ceres machine (NS32032), aka 32-bit, in 1986.

I know general-purpose programming languages are supposed to be neutral towards hardware, but let's face it, most really don't care (anymore) for 16-bit. (Now, Modula-2 was explicitly implemented on 16-bit machines at the time, hence the need for CARDINAL as memory was tight, which Oberon removed since generally INTEGER is "big enough" these days.) Again, a lot of people seem to indicate that 16-bit is dead or useless and hardware seems to mostly agree with that. But it just feels sloppy to me.

Two's compliment, ASCII, little endian, 32-bit regs, 8-bit bytes, flat memory model, FPU always present, [un]aligned memory access, Unicode, threads, garbage collection, LFNs, POSIX support ... how many more assumptions can we make without looking foolish??

> > I'm no linker expert, far from it, similarly for OMF
> Me neither I've written 1 16bit linker (not released) and started to add
> omf later but got busy with work. That was back in around 1997/98 by the
> time I had time again mid 00's things had moved on to the point that i
> though why bother working on it when the world was by then 32bit.
GCC and Linux never properly supported 16-bit. And obviously once WinNT became mainstream, MS didn't care either. It's sad, really, that 16-bit is considered a dirty word. I'm afraid that 32-bit will one day be considered the same thing due to similar 64-bit arrogance. Why does everything have to be a pissing contest??

> > or actually freakin' anything really!
> Yeah right, don't put yourself down ;-)
I just want to make it clear that I don't think my hacks are too useful or important so that nobody misunderstands. It's all I've got, take it or leave it. ;-)

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