I know what you are thinking, wouldn’t it be great if you could create MS-DOS executables directly from a Win64 desktop with no MS-DOS needed?
Well, I just found out about this unofficial Open Watcom v2 project that targets the usual suspects, allows you to compile from Win64!
Some of the features of this fork include:
- New 2-phase build system, OW can be build by platform native C/C++ compiler or by itself
- Code generator properly initialize pointers by DLL symbol addresses
- DOS version of tools now support long file names (LFN) if appropriate LFN driver is loaded by DOS
- OW is ported to 64-bit hosts (WIN64, Linux X64)
- Librarian support X64 CPU object modules and libraries
- RDOS 32-bit C run-time compact memory model libraries are fixed
- Resource compiler and Resource editors support WIN64 executables
- OW text editor is now self containing, it can be used as standalone tool without any requirements for any additional files or configuration
- Broken C++ compiler pre-compiled header template support is fixed
- Many C++ compiler crashes are fixed
- Debugger has no length limit for any used environment variable
Binaries are available on sourceforge.
So how does it fare? I thought I’d take the old Wolf4GW, and compile it with this toolset. The first hurdle I hit was this fun feature:
- The C++ compiler now treats warning W737, implicit conversion of pointers to integral types of same size, as an error.
Which is an integral part of wl_menu.cpp . So this was somewhat problematic, until I just commented out that block, and while I was expecting no working keyboard, I’m able to play, and load/save games…. Even the boss key works.
So with the W737 taken care of, I have to say this thing compiles FAST. Incredibly FAST. If for some reason you have to build 16bit or 32bit anything, you should look at a 64bit tool chain, well assuming you have a 64bit computer by now.
If anyone want’s to build their own Wolf4GW with the newer OpenWatcom, my source drop is here.