winscape 2376

All desirable when all you care about is bootstrapping a bios flash program or fiddling registers on a lan board. All undesirable when you're talking about general application software. DOS has no desirable features for things like compilers and word processors and network stacks. Its not even properly re-entrant which makes it subtly difficult to augment with resident software. And even if you suceed in getting resident software loaded to fancy up DOS, there aren't any really effective standards to keep the resident software from conflicting.

I got out of the simple .exe business when I stopped using my Atari 800. If you're going to support anything more than the most trivial uses of the hardware, msdos isn't a desirable platform. It is possible to write big, complicatd software on it but it takes a lot of work. I've done it and it sucks- Win32 Visual Basic is a better platform for big software than DOS is.

You have got to be kidding. Debug is a p.o.s compared to any other debugger- even Microsoft's debugger was more useful. Debug can't handle symbol tables & debug info for one thing. No stack traces for another. No stack frame awareness for a 3rd.

Sure, you can type in buttembly- bfd just use a text editor, write macro buttembly to your heart's content, then compile it. If you must use msdos- get a copy of the Borland buttembler and turbo debugger which is a vast improvement over the contemporary Misfot products, and included a number of syntax improvements which helps make real mode x86 buttembly more bearable.

Gregm