Building for DOS, OS/2, and DOS on a MacBook Apple Silicon | Hacker News Reader

Building for DOS, OS/2, and DOS on a MacBook Apple Silicon

retrocoding.net

95 pointsingve14 comments

Looks like a pretty good tool for people who want to walk the "Carmack path" that is to re-create all games John Carmack programmed between Shadowforge and Quake.

Let's put up some description:

Carmack Jam! The most exciting Jam that requires you to follow the steps of a giant so that you can experience the thrills (and pains) of the 90s!

Path A: Humble path (Use C/C++ with SDL2 on a modern PC)

Competitors may use their own graphic resources, or read from the original game assets for bonus points!

Participants are not requested to produce a full game, rather, they are requested to produce a game engine with similar->full features comparing to the original game.

Here is the list of games to be produced (Only one game is required for Trilogies, Doubles or games with similar mechanics and looks)

- Wraith (or any turn-based, tile-scrolling Ultima spin-off)

- Dark Designs (or any blobber)

- Catacomb (or anything similar)

- Slordax (or any vertical scrolling shooter)

- Commander Keen (or any side scrolling platformer)

- Rescue Rover (Optional, I guess this does not hold too much technical improvement)

- Hovertank 3D (Optional, but maybe it's a good starter game for 3d stuffs)

- Catacomb 3D (Optional, it has textured mapping)

- Wolfenstein 3D

- Shadowcaster (Notice the increasing number of features of the 4 games)

- Doom

- Quake

Path B: Demi-God path (See description below)

Participants must use the original development environment. Real machines are given bonus points, while VMs are allowed. I'm actually not sure whether we have good NextStep VMs so maybe we should also allow Pentium machines using Windows NT, but it seems to be pretty far from the original development environment.

Please note that game development tools are also required to be coded on the original development environment.

I really like this idea and copied it down into my notes as a possible project. Is there a community or site for this? Searching for it takes me back to this comment.

No this is just my own idea, plus it's just too much work for a jam. It's going to take years to complete all projects.

Seems to be a typo in the title. (Also on the linked site as well.)

Title currently reads:

> Building for DOS, OS/2, and DOS on a MacBook Apple Silicon

But from the content of the post it seems it should be

> Building for DOS, OS/2, and 16/32-bit Windows on a MacBook Apple Silicon

As i remember Watcom was first compiler that may produce NetWare NLM. Second was Metrowerx CodeWarrior

A different option is to grab a standard ELF toolchain for i386, like GCC + Binutils, and then convert your ELF binary into a format that can run on DOS.

Which is what I did: https://github.com/depp/elf2dos.git

This is not really a polished, supported product, just a program I wrote to make DOS programs on Linux or Mac.

> GCC will still emit calls to memcpy, memmove, memset, and memcmp, so you may need to define these.

So you write a memcpy implementation, GCC figures this just copies memory and emits a call to memcpy!

Wow, the name Watcom takes me back 30+ years. My first job was porting actuarial valuation software in FORTRAN from System370 to PCs. We used Watcom for the FORTRAN and the C orchestration part, hosted on OS/2. Probably the top C compiler for PCs back then IIRC.

Seeing the name Watcom takes me back to my days of high school computer science doing BASIC and Pascal.

I'm sure that there's a good reason to do it this way but I was wondering what would the benefits of doing it this way instead of installing openwatcom using whisky.

A few weeks ago I gave it a chance out of curiosity because I wanted to run total comander and was pleasantly surprised of how well it worked which makes me think that it should be able to run openwatcom perfectly.

Side note: in the end, even though TC worked great I just crossed that item from my ToDo and continued using double commander (although the search feature is much better in TC).

It runs natively, not under emulation, and can integrate with any other build system that you have running natively. Granted, if you're building DOS apps, the overhead of running the x64 version of OpenWatcom in emulation probably isn't bad as it's still orders of magnitude faster than it was back in the day.

I also do retro development on an Apple Silicon device, and like the author I built OpenWatcom so I could run it natively. I have it tied into the build system for the rest of my project and it works great.

Why are there dos DOSes in the title?

A bit out of topic: Does OpenWatcom support building MacOS executables?

I think no. There were versions of GCC that could, and FreePascal does. Microsoft Visual C++ (2.0?) could from Windows, and of course CodeWarrior, Symantec C++, Think C/Pascal, and MPW/Apple compilers.

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