Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Figure out and document the build and test instructions #2

Open
volkertb opened this issue Feb 28, 2017 · 0 comments
Open

Figure out and document the build and test instructions #2

volkertb opened this issue Feb 28, 2017 · 0 comments

Comments

@volkertb
Copy link
Owner

volkertb commented Feb 28, 2017

Although the ultimate goal is to port the code to an open source assembler dialect such as FASM (see #1), a first step would be to figure out and document how to build the artifacts (temu.com and vsb.com) using the original toolchain, as well as how to build the tests, which are written in Turbo Pascal.

Embarcadero currently offers versions of Borland C and Turbo Pascal for free legal download for people who register on-line on their site. I have had some success in assembling and linking the sources, although the resulting COM executables do not appear to have the same exact checksum as the COM files that were included in the ZIP archive that contained the sources.

NOTE: Apparently, one of the included Pascal source files, mvsb.pas, compiles into a tool that makes up part of the build chain. This specific tool is responsible for combining the QEMM-specific version of VSB and the clean DOS version of VSB into a single unified executable (COM?) file.

The exact versions and hashes of the proprietary utilities that were apparently used for assembling and linking the Assembly sources:

name version size date SHA-256 what it does OSS alternative
exe2bin.exe ? 27232 1994-07-11 31f0dc09a03874f674127693f546d401bda8f885e9fc1c0720c005a209f847ac Converts single-segment EXEs to COMs Yes, bundled with FreeDOS
tasm.exe 3.2i 214097 1995-12-29 9159877479b2e6001b7d566b269675b3b67501e4bdc910d6857d673f1f0ed545 Assembles assembly code to object code none that are fully compatible
tlib.exe ? 34646 1994-11-10 f91295a413331d6a0e7478c431a8de2b12ec57d1fb321e55cde4e555c9990dac OS/2 utility??? OS/2 utility???
tlink.exe 3.01 143329 1994-11-10 b23826239ac2e89f49aef927f24d0a85dc3c0ea940557f066c0383db49c4363a links object code to executable binaries possibly, requires further research

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

1 participant