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NASM version 2.09 available | 8086 is COOOOL (Announce)

posted by ecm Homepage E-mail, Düsseldorf, Germany, 07.09.2010, 16:22

> What about the RxDOS (GPL) hack using A86 (shareware) instead of MASM?
RxDOS 7.1.5 is trash. So is A86; and it kinda defeats the purpose of using a self-recompiling assembler if you can't compile it because you lack the source code. (Actually, we don't even know whether A86 really is self-compiling.)

> Even Japheth compiled one tiny piece of it with JWasm.
Yeah. You could arguably make (a)7.1.5 work with JWasm with little effort, but it's still trash.

> But cm's NASM fork is probably better.
It's neither a fork nor a port any more. I've probably rewritten at least 50% of the code by now.

> Then again, no expectations, I think he's just doing it
> for fun, no timetable.
True. Expect releases in early 2038. (In the year 2038, that is.)

> (And Debian hates OSI's approval of the Sybase license.)
It's still the best 16-bit DOS compiler though, isn't it? If I had the choice maybe I would use a 2-clause BSD compiler with OpenWatcom's capabilities instead.

> Any of those can compile FreeDOS's KERNEL.SYS.
Now you could back up TC's alleged ability to produce small code. Do you have the necessary setup to compare a TC compile of TFK with an OpenWatcom compile?

> > For 8086 development just binary and OMF are sufficient.
>
> ELKS probably uses what BCC/Dev86 uses, AS86 (a.out?) I guess.
That's a somewhat exotic environment. Besides, they probably don't have NASM syntax source code anyway, do they?

It's still a good answer to that statement though.

> Of course, FreeCOM 0.84-pre2 needs 186+ for having all features.
Ahahahahah. Are you kidding us, or are they? True, the new 186 instructions are useful, but they can all easily be replaced by equivalent 8086 code. With a few macros, you probably wouldn't even have to touch the code.

These are the instructions exclusive to 186+:

* POPA/PUSHA
* SHL/SHR/SAR/ROL/ROR/RCL/RCR with immediate
* ENTER, LEAVE
* Did I forget any? Yes: PUSH immediate, and some less useful: BOUND, IMUL immediate, string I/O.

Besides the ones I called less useful, you can replace all of these using simple macros. Then there's just a few things on the 8086 to be considered, like invalid opcodes not throwing Int06 and shift counts in cl ain't limited.

> and nobody complained.
How about somebody complain about it now?

---
l

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