On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 19:19 +0000, Paul wrote:
Hi,
> I'm just reviewing a DOSEmu package, where the package author includes a
> tarball of FreeDOS installation (binary images of a couple of basic DOS
> utilities, shell and the kernel). I believe that it's probably illegal
> (provided it's GPL code, I have not checked) to do this unless we
> distribute sources as well.
Following this, I decided to look at the source to see if it would be a
trivial task to get the code running under gcc with nasm. It seems there
are a couple of big problems.
1. The use of the FAR/far macros. These are a kickback to the old 16 bit
days and as gcc doesn't have an 8086 backend, the closest I could find
is Lambertsen's ia16 backend (from 2007). No idea if it'll do the job.
What came to my mind here was dev86's bcc. I didn't even believe gcc
compiles Intel 8086 code, though I've heard that it's used to compile
Bochs BIOS, so... Anyways, I've not tried to get it to build with bcc,
though I saw a mailing list post (I can't find it now) about it, that
remained unanswered.
2. Next is the assembler bits. While nasm will compile 16 bit code,
it's
another pain in the backside to getting the source to build.
I thought they already use nasm for their builds. At least their wiki
says so [1].
[1]
http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/freedos/index.php?title=FreeDOS_Spe...
--
"Excuse all the blood" -- Dead