>
> Thanks for that, grabbed it.
> As far as I know, powerbasic is the only company that still actively sells
> and supports a dos compiler. Their version 3.5 is still available for
> purchase. I have their windows version too, though I'm 1 version back
> (running pbcc 5.0, and pbwin 8.0), but still an excellent product. I am
> glad they still support dos, but it sure does make it hard to opensource pb
> code, because nobody wants to pay for the compiler these days. :-(.
> Anyway, getting off topic here, sorry folks, but thanks for the url,
> already downloaded it, will begin fiddling with it, to see what I can do
> with it.
> I've never been that great at i386 assembly, but I'm decent enough to
> figure this all out with a bit of study.
>
No problem! Yeah, PowerBASIC was a great product wihch produced some of the
fastest apps around. It was a pretty phenomenal compiler, but as you point
out, nobody wants to have to buy a compiler anymore. Plus now with the
likes of GCC, Open Watcom, FreeBASIC, et al., you really no longer have to
purchase a commercial product to get awesome optimized code output.
Even at version 1.42 the GUI wasn't much to look at. IIRC, it was basically
just an execution environment at that point which let small little apps run
which were coded in the instruction format it understood which in turn were
generated by a little assembler I built for that purpose. At one point I
had it running a tiny app which displayed the current speed benchmark,
another showing the date and another showing the time all simultaneously.
In the debug shell there was a 'thread' command which showed all currently
running applications and their specifics, along with provisions to load
more apps, kill apps and so on. In the interest of being able to run more
software I eventually abandoned the custom instruction set in favor of a
virtual x86 machine model which will be able to load and run multiple DOS
apps in isolated memory spaces. Using this design, one could use whatever
development tools they wish instead of having to rely on my obscure little
assembler.
My apologies also for drifting off course!
[/OffTopicSideDiscussion]
lol
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dive into the World of Parallel Programming! The Go Parallel Website,
sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your
hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought
leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a
look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net
_______________________________________________
Freedos-devel mailing list
Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
