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I miss being able to make small programs in debug on a Dos prompt and just dumping the machine code to a com file. It was a great way to test out and learn asse

I miss being able to make small programs in debug on a Dos prompt and just dumping the machine code to a com file. It was a great way to test out and learn assembly language, and you didn't need a compiler or any other programs to make something that executed other than what was built in and a nice printed list of interrupts. Some simple things I remember playing with in middle school, might work in a dosbox emulator window?: pc speaker: out 61,1 change video mode: mov ax,0x13 int 0x10 Then there were cool msdos debug scripts, where you had text listings of assembly with debug commands that when piped into debug it wrote out a com file: https://www.google.com/search?q=dos+debug+script&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=dos+debug+script&ie=utf-8&oe... Some could low level format hard drives, and there were lots of other fun utilities and amusements, much more so than batch files. I'd say the modern analogue is python scripts.

int_19h 9y ago
If you're feeling nostalgic about the DOS era and the associated hackery, give PCem a try: https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/ https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/ It's an x86 emulator that works on hardware level (so from BIOS on, you're running real code that was running on those DOS machines), and with a focus on emulating the hardware from that era specifically, ranging from the earliest 8086 machines and MDA adapters, and up to 3dfx Voodoo era. Obviously this is mostly useful for gaming, but if you wanted to hack around with TASM or Borland Pascal just like in good old times, it's also great.
- webtechgal 9y ago
  And this one is a live/online emulator: http://www.pcjs.org/ http://www.pcjs.org/
grkvlt 9y ago
Yeah, I remember getting a huge Microsoft reference book as a birthday present that listed all the BIOS, DOS and VGA system calls and their INT numbers and arguments. I then used it and DEBUG to write a tiny 'paint' program in ~80 bytes that did the following: 1. entered VGA mode 2. enabled the mouse cursor 3. checked the mouse status 4. turned on the pixel at the mouse location if the button was down 5. goto 3

int_19h 9y ago

If you're feeling nostalgic about the DOS era and the associated hackery, give PCem a try: https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/ https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/ It's an x86 emulator that works on hardware level (so from BIOS on, you're running real code that was running on those DOS machines), and with a focus on emulating the hardware from that era specifically, ranging from the earliest 8086 machines and MDA adapters, and up to 3dfx Voodoo era. Obviously this is mostly useful for gaming, but if you wanted to hack around with TASM or Borland Pascal just like in good old times, it's also great.

webtechgal 9y ago
And this one is a live/online emulator: http://www.pcjs.org/ http://www.pcjs.org/

grkvlt 9y ago

Yeah, I remember getting a huge Microsoft reference book as a birthday present that listed all the BIOS, DOS and VGA system calls and their INT numbers and arguments. I then used it and DEBUG to write a tiny 'paint' program in ~80 bytes that did the following: 1. entered VGA mode 2. enabled the mouse cursor 3. checked the mouse status 4. turned on the pixel at the mouse location if the button was down 5. goto 3