16bit code generation

[Austin English]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 5:34 PM, King InuYasha <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 5:46 AM, Tijl Coosemans <tijl at ulyssis.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Sunday 22 March 2009 04:00:16 Austin English wrote:
>> > Wine supports 16 bit apps, just not as well as 32-bit. Dan had an
>> > intern work on a 16 bit test suite
>> > (http://code.google.com/p/win16test/), which can be used to test 16
>> > bit support, fwiw.
>>
>> Yes, this is what I meant to refer to. AFAIK this test suite isn't part
>> of Wine because it needs Open Watcom. Now it seems gcc could be used
>> (perhaps with some help from winegcc).
>> There's more at http://sourceware.org/binutils/docs/as/i386_002d16bit.html
>>
>>
>
> What is wrong with OpenWatcom? It is an open source development toolchain,
> with experimental linux binaries, yes, but they do work the last time I
> checked (which was when 1.8 release came out).
>
>
>

It's not widely available, it's license is not open enough for many
distros (ArchLinux has it available, and there's an initial Gentoo
ebuild according to their wiki), but Fedora/Suse/Ubuntu don't have it
available.

It's also not known how well it works under Linux. There was talk
about detecting if a user has it installed, then compiling 16 bit code
in that case, but no one's worked to see if OpenWatcom works when
ran/installed natively.

-- 
-Austin