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clean dos extender executable format (Developers)

posted by tkchia Homepage, 08.01.2023, 19:05

Hello kerravon,

> It would probably be good for doing hexdumps if
> my a.out was aligned on a 16-byte boundary.
> So what do you think of making that say:
> AO + NUL + NUL + 12 * NUL?
> followed by the normal 32-bit a.out which does
> INT 21H calls?
You could do that — or, you could just put the a.out there without any additional tagging. I believe a.out has its own magic number(s) too.

> And then I will need to write an actual DOS extender
> which does DPMI calls, right?
Well, or you could hack an existing DOS extender to recognize your a.out file format, and massage the argv[] and envp[] information into a form that it can use. Other than HX, extenders such as CauseWay, DOS/32A, and PMODE/W are now also open source.

(I happen to be tinkering with the CauseWay extender lately, for use with the gcc-ia16 toolchain. This is mainly because it supports running 16-bit protected mode programs (!). CauseWay is public domain too.)

> And in hindsight, does this look neater than existing
> DOS extender formats?
That I will leave to you to judge. :flower:

Thank you!

---
https://gitlab.com/tkchia · https://codeberg.org/tkchia · 😴 "MOV AX,0D500H+CMOS_REG_D+NMI"

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