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FPC 16-bit (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 16.05.2013, 20:35

> I really think that DOS 16-bit native version of FPC is not needed
For the record, I never suggested, demanded, or expected such, by far. I just don't personally see the justification for all of the modern day additions in software.

Modern just makes things harder to maintain, unstable, and drops support for 99% of the pre-existing computing world. (Remember when Ruby 1.9 dropped like 9 OSes? And yet it was that "old" 1.8 version that was ISO standardized. I'm afraid it will be yet another ignored standard that "nobody" cares about. Why even have standards if "nobody" cares for anything outside of POSIX [Mac and Linux] or Windows? Money and politics, there's no other justification.)

> with assumption that we have good and reliable DOS 32-bit version
> which can cross-compile into 16-bit.
I think this is far from being a stable backend just yet. For now it's probably? just one man scratching an itch.

> All FPC code does not expect limited memory block size so adaptation would
> be extremely complicated and the result would be very, very buggy.
I didn't expect anyone to care. I was just saying it would be possible. (Keep in mind that they can barely keep the 32-bit DOS port working, so it's not limited 640 kb memory or 16-bit that is holding anyone back!)

> However if somebody really wants to run FPC on 16-bit machine it should be
> possible and not so complicated to use some kind od 386 emulation on 8086
> processor.
> I don't know if such emulator exists but such emulator shouldn't be so
> complicated as someone could expect because only some very basic emulation
> of PC would be sufficient (no need for graphic modes, sound, etc.)
There was an old DOS shareware 386 real-mode-only emulator for 286 [sic] machines, IIRC. It's still available on Sac.Sk, lemme find it:


em3134b1.zip    UTILMISC    EMU386 v1.34 Beta 1 - 386 capabilities emulator for 286s       19060   1998-02-24 02:35:00
em386133.zip    UTILMISC    EMU386 v1.33 - Real-mode 386 Opcode Emulator for 286 PCs       18795   1998-01-21 02:51:00


Never tried it, but IIRC, it only traps SIGILL (int 6?) and emulates the 32-bit arithmetic stuff.

(Obviously ANSI C requires long int, which is minimum 32-bits, and many 16-bit C compilers support that, and even others like Turbo Pascal or Oberon-M. So it's not like 32-bit arithmetic was so hard to use for 16-bit machines.)

> Anyway - I hope that 16-bit FPC will not suffer by bugs present in GO32V2
> target.
> Marcov, have you read this my post?
> http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?...amp;page=0&category=0&order=last_answer
He probably read it, but he's not the DOS maintainer (there is none), so it's not his priority. And it's fair to assume he's not interested in prolonging DOS.

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