On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Dave wrote:
I am thinking about trying to flesh out some of my BIOS/BootProm ideas. I would like to do so in C using Micro$ofts Visual Studio (mainly because I have it and am familiar with it).
Can M$-VC 5.0 (or M$-VC 6.0) be used to develop PROM based x86 code?
Currently I'd say it can't. The Makefiles are quite Unix/GNU specific. You need gcc and nasm installed on a Linux/Unix box to compile the sources.
I have been told that it can. Something about setting some switches in the compiler. But I need to know more about _how_ it is done. There are lots of details that I need to know about. Like setting program/data address origins, creating the binary file and converting it to HEX or another format that can be burned into PROM.
Theoretically I think it's possible. I don't have a VC licence nor VC installed on any of my boxes, so I can't tell you how to do this. If anyone is willing to fiddle around with this, it would of course be nice. Is VC producing better code than i.e. egcs or gcc?
If you have experience doing embedded or BIOS work on x86 systems using the Micro$oft development environment I would really appreciate some pointers.
Until now, we used a Linux development environment because it's really cheap.. I think we could try to go both ways simultaneously, though.
Regards, Stefan