On Wed, May 01, 2019 at 09:05:35PM -0500, Rugxulo wrote: > We're talking about the host platform, not the target. Yes, you can still > assemble with NASM (or YASM or FASM) for 8086 target, but none of those > assemblers themselves can (easily) be rebuilt to run hosted on 16-bit > machines anymore.
Well my "host platform" obviously is 16 bit - since it's FreeDOS. But yes, I was indeed somewhat amazed at "mammoth size" of NASM binary, compared, as example, to modest 33 KB of A86.COM. > DJGPP is 32-bit pmode, DPMI. Also, NASM has required C99 compiler support > for many years, which almost none of the pre-existing 16-bit compilers > support (even OpenWatcom is incomplete). > > It's not that big a deal. 386 compatibles have been around for decades. I > just wanted to briefly mention that there were 16-bit NASM builds back in > the day since some of us are still sympathetic (at least in theory). > > N.B. The 8088 [sic] turns 40 this year. That's the one the original IBM PC > used. The one "slower than Commodore 64" ;) https://trixter.oldskool.org/2011/06/04/at-a-disadvantage/ #v+ Quick, without doing any research: What early 1980s computer was faster, the IBM PC or the Commodore 64? The IBM PC ran an 8088 at nearly 5MHz, whereas the C64 ran a 6502 variant at 1MHz. The PC cost thousands of dollars, the C64 hundreds. The PC had a 1 megabyte address space; the C64 only 64K. Is this a trick question? It is! The C64 was faster. The original IBM PC, despite appearances and bias on the part of both consumers and marketing, was actually the slowest popular personal computer on the market at the time of its release, even compared to the Apple II and Atari 400. Here's why. [..] What took 6 cycles on the C64 takes 37 cycles on the IBM PC #v- -- regards, Zbigniew _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
