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R. Swan's A72 assembler (8086, self-assembling, 11k .COM) (Developers)

posted by kerravon, Ligao, Free World North, 04.07.2021, 01:25

Thanks guys for your suggestions.

I personally can use tcc and tasm to compile
my programs because I bought both. I bought
bcc too.

tcc 1.01 was made freely available for download
at one point, but they then started being coy.

It's almost like all the vultures are circling
waiting for tasm to be freely available because
they know the value of it, but everyone's being
quiet about it, hoping the 8086 has been
forgotten or something. I never expected to see
westerners fighting over toilet paper, and maybe
one day I will see them fighting over the last
working XT or something.

Ideally I want a public domain assembler written
in C90 capable of running on an 8086. But I
haven't got to that point yet. My focus is still
on the OS (PDOS/86).

I don't use a lot of assembler, but I do have an
expectation that people can rebuild both PDOS/86
and PDOS/386 (loader only) real mode code with
Microsoft's tools, to build a commercial derivative.

Or tasm as a commercial replacement.

But it would be good if there was a free version
available too. I have wasm and wasmr, which work
fine, but preclude commercial use.

All of the above have versions that work on an 8086,
which is great, and I can write to a common subset,
at least of tasm + wasm which I can test.

For free, commercial use, even cross-compiling from
Windows (or Freedos+HX), I have nothing that will
accept my code. Nevermind asking for 8086 native.

I don't consider it to be my code that is wrong,
so I am reluctant to change my code.

So this new nasm option is of interest to me, as
at long last they seem to have some interest in
support the industry-standard masm (with at
least tasm and wasm as semi-clones).

Anyway, my most important code is here, part of
PDOS/386's loader:

https://sourceforge.net/p/pdos/gitcode/ci/master/tree/src/protinta.asm

Here is what I am getting:

C:\devel\pdos\src>nasm -v
NASM version 2.15.05 compiled on Aug 28 2020

C:\devel\pdos\src>nasm --before "%use masm" -Dmemmodel=tiny protinta.asm 2>&1 | head
protinta.asm:20: error: label or instruction expected at start of line
protinta.asm:21: warning: label alone on a line without a colon might be in error [-w+label-orphan]
protinta.asm:23: error: parser: instruction expected
protinta.asm:24: error: parser: instruction expected
protinta.asm:25: error: parser: instruction expected
protinta.asm:26: error: parser: instruction expected
protinta.asm:28: error: parser: instruction expected
protinta.asm:29: error: parser: instruction expected
protinta.asm:30: error: parser: instruction expected
protinta.asm:31: error: parser: instruction expected


Line 20 is:

% .model memodel,c


Removing the "%" doesn't help.

I'm not an assembler expert, but this is working
code which I expect to assemble by an assembler
that is 1.3 MB in size.

Adding "-t" doesn't help.

Any ideas?

BTW, I have another problem. I actually realized
that what I want to do is build PDOS/86 in huge
memory model instead of large. Watcom generates
the code I need. Turbo C++ doesn't. Smaller C
does, but uses 80386 instructions. I don't know
what Microsoft C does. Or Zortech C. Again,
ideally I would have an 8086 C compiler, but
cross-compiling from 80386 is better than
nothing. Freedos+HX is actually an excellent
environment. But I think I need to marry it up
with a laptop that can have SeaBIOS flashed.
And I need modifications to SeaBIOS too, to
get INT 14H to do bluetooth/wifi too. But that
campaign hasn't really started yet.

Thanks. Paul.

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