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NASM version 2.09 available (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 03.09.2010, 05:51

> Already thought about that. I'll probably disable macho and elf (maybe rdf
> too), but win32 and coff might be useful for HX and DJGPP development.

Well, it's a slippery slope. The only format that definitely can't be used in DOS (that I know of) is Mach-O. Everything else has weird hacks or libraries that can work (EMX or DJELF or BCC/Dev86).

I checked yesterday, the old 0.98.39 16-bit .EXE (I think) supported bin, obj, as86, and win32.

> That could be accomplished with an additional makefile for Open Watcom that
> only has 16-bit DOS as target. (The label dos is currently
> used for the DPMI output format in the Open Watcom makefile.)
2.09's "wmake -f mkfiles\openwcom.mak dos" doesn't work as-is in pure DOS with DOS-hosted compiler due to cmdline limits (128 bytes? 126?).

> I thought about disabling post-386 instructions too. This way, one would be
> able to create basic 32-bit programs with the 16-bit build, but anything
> else would require the DJGPP build.
486 and 586 are pretty minor, so they should also be included, IMHO, but everything beyond that is overkill.

> Yep, already done. I also tested other different options. I have to
> manually enter different data segment names to avoid overflowing the
> default segment. All the data needs to be handled as far too. (Large
> or Huge memory model.) Maybe Open Watcom can be talked into moving
> data to overlays, which may or may not enable segments or even single items
> larger than 64 KiB.
Unpacked, the old 16-bit 0.98.39 .EXE is less than 250 kb, which should leave ample memory (famous last words) for reasonable projects. (You could argue that they should be split into separate .OBJs anyways if bigger.)

> > EDIT: Oops, TC doesn't support C99, doh.
>
> I really wasn't looking forward to extend my toolchain to the semi-free TC
> either. (You only get the binaries, and only from that one hidden museum
> site.)
I know, I just meant it generates smaller code (I think).

> Actually, the oldest real machine I'm running has a 586-class CPU. Porting
> it to a 16-bit platform is just for fun.
Jim Leonard hasn't been as active as before, he hasn't responded to some basic e-mails, so maybe he's losing interest, else I'd suggest you e-mail him (so he could test on his 8088). Perhaps Mike Chambers would be interested??

> It could be optional, with disk swapping if no XMM is installed. Because,
> you see, I did mention disk swapping and XMS.
Ralf Brown's SPAWNO?? (Don't forget EMS! Trixter's 8088 has 2 MB of real EMS!)

> > I guess he likes the new macro features or whatever.
>
> 0.98.xx was a joke compared to what we get now.

I personally never fell in love with all the HLL stuff that MASM, etc. added, but feel free to use whatever floats your boat!

> (Also, I don't know whether
> you are allowed to use 2.06 or older releases under the 2-clause BSD
> license. That's important to me for ideological reasons.)
Dunno, doubt it, but LGPL ain't so horrible either. I just think "an assembler is an assembler", and "it's good enough" or whatever. All the string and preprocessing stuff isn't as useful (to me personally).

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