On 27-Dec-22 12:19 PM, Chris via cctalk wrote:
It cannot rely on bios/ms-dos services for compiling preferably. Iow I'd like to perform what I want to do on the target machine itself, LOL which is hysterical as I've never even seen it boot even once. I could complie on a standard pc I suppose and pop a disk in the Northstar Dimension. It would be nice if it's optimized for it's 80186. Or at least supports it's instructions. My goal is to get MINIX running on it, as the original Netware-86 OS has proven to be more rare then really anything else. From there I'd like to figure out how to support the pc compatible (or so we're told) logic boards that are plugged into the motherboard like standard isa cards, and even have 34 contacts on their card edge. It would be nice if someone had the ideal compiler package they don't need and could sell.
I don't know anything about the Dimension, can it boot regular MSDOS floppies? Circa late 80s I used to recompile the Minix 1-point-something kernel and utilities under Minix on a plain 8088 clone with two (IIRC 360k) floppies only, no HD. The Minix C compiler (Toby mentioned Amsterdam, that sounds like it) took a loooong while, but it was doable and actually worked. I still have all the diskettes for it somewhere.
