Comment by bajsejohannes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bajsejohannes | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Has anyone got it compiling yet?

I've tried in DOSBOX, using this MASM from this (possibly sketchy?) site: http://www.mediafire.com/file/x13v7gqqmw1pom7/8086_Assembler... . The output is as follows:

    Microsoft (R) Macro Assembler Version 5.00
    Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1981-1985, 1987.  All rights reserved.
    
    Object filename [GWMAIN.OBJ]: Source listing  [NUL.LST]: Cross-reference [NUL.CRF]: End of file encountered on input file
    GWMAIN.ASM(3568): warning A4085: End of file, no END directive
    Open segments: CSEG
    OEM.H(55): warning A4016: Reserved word used as symbol: SHORT
    OEM.H(102): warning A4016: Reserved word used as symbol: LENGTH
    OEM.H(165): warning A4016: Reserved word used as symbol: LENGTH
    End of file encountered on input file
    GWMAIN.ASM(3568): warning A4085: End of file, no END directive
    
      51620 + 169980 Bytes symbol space free
    
          4 Warning Errors
          1 Severe  Errors

TASM (version 2.5) gives a similar error.

Mentioned it in another reply, you'd probably want to start with the MASM and LINK from the MS-DOS 2.0 release.

https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/tree/master/v2.0/bin

Probably you want to try out PCem when dosbox doesn't do the trick. Was a lot of fun for me! I made a small page about PCem here: https://juangacovas.info/doku.php/windows/howtos/pcemu-page

Unfortunately, I can't get MS-DOS 2.0 to run in DOSBOX ("Invalid COMMAND.COM") and running MASM.EXE directly gives me some really interesting errors (looks like it's reading uninitialized memory).

I think you're on to something here, though!

Good job! I'm going to throw some cycles at this, this holiday weekend.

https://github.com/lpsantil/GW-BASIC

DOSBOX can't run older DOS programs, try my emulator: https://github.com/dmsc/emu2 , ASM86 runs in it.

Also, as written in the blog post, the .ASM files are not the original sources, more a temporary expansion of these for the given target. Looking at their binary form, all .ASM files end with zero characters instead of, for example, 0x1a with which .H files end. It can be that some tools (different than those originally used) have problems with the zeroes at the end?

That's a good observation. I tried stripping zeroes, but unfortunately it's the same error message.

I'm no assembly genius, but the GWBASIC source is for the 8088 CPU and not the 8086 (the chips are slightly different) - maybe that is why? Also, DOSBox is not 100% compatible with original hardware - Try it again in a VM under VirtualBox maybe?

The 8086 and 8088 are architecturally identical and run the exact same code. The only difference is that the 8088 runs an 8-bit external bus.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com