Hello! On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 11:08 AM TK Chia <u1049321...@caramail.com> wrote: > > > doing that tomorrow. The makefiles are messy, and I'm no make expert, > > but they should both be 100% reproducible (if anyone is honestly > > interested). If I don't find any obvious problems, I'll probably > > I for one would like to know how you wrote the makefiles for nasm --- I > have not managed to get a 16-bit build working using Watcom.
Okay, I think I've done enough fiddling to be worth sharing. So here it is (lacking any better place for us): * http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/devel/asm/nasm/0.98.39/8086host/ Further testing and contributions are welcome, of course. IIRC, you can type "whelp tools" to read about OpenWatcom's Wmake. With that advice, I greatly simplified the included makefile.wcd , and it seems to work. (However, I have not tested again under 8086tinyplus yet, but I assume I didn't break anything.) I also greatly improved the makefile.bor for freeware TC++ 1.01. Compared to older (TC 2.01 or TP 5.5) make, it's much improved. I read through Chapter 12 of the User's Guide (dead tree edition), which helped a lot. In the past, I've also used FreeDOS' Dmake build, which works fairly well. But that had some problems under Fake86 (emulator, miscompiled??), so I ended up just writing a "simple" .BAT instead (for one project of mine). You know, you don't have to only use the included Make with a certain compiler. You can use any others. I kinda doubt TC 2.01's Make is worth using, but I'm still (barely) sympathetic. Ironically, despite claiming MCGA support, 8086tinyplus doesn't play PSR Invaders at all, gets stuck somewhere. Go figure. (I think the BIOS for 8086tiny was written with NASM, but I've never looked closely nor recompiled it.) I need to test under 8086tinyplus again, for various reasons. In particular, measure some timings on reassembling PSR Invaders. I can think of a few tricks to try to speed it up (on my end, in scripting, without rebuilding NASM again). I'm not super familiar with truly classic/retro machines. I can only imagine. Well, some people (ahem, LGR) know what they're doing (not me). :-) * https://monotech.fwscart.com/NuXT_MicroATX_Turbo_XT_955MHz_832K_RAM_XTCF_SVGA_Floppy_Serial/p6083514_19777986.aspx For those machines, I'd assume a RAM disk would help a lot. And using suitable tools (A86/D86, AWK, Turbo Pascal, some kind of Forth, maybe QBASIC), of course. But I disagree that you can "only" cross-compile for such "embedded" machines. Sure, that's valid too (FPC's i8086-msdos), and I'm not complaining about that. But there's still "some" things you can do natively! I swear, optimizing for old machines (with their limits) helps software for new machines run better and faster, too! Limits are actually good sometimes. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
