Re: DJGPP and VSTa

[Tommy Thorn <tthorn@daimi.aau.dk> writes:]

>Just curious: Why was VSTa initially developed in DOS? Wasn't Linux
>aviable/good enough at the start of development?

At the time I started, no, Linux wasn't good enough. Also, my ultimate
plan was to simply use DOS as a bootstrap loader. DOS is simpler, smaller,
and more widely available than Linux. It makes a good bootstrap loader.
Linux makes a better operating system, no argument about that.

>Anyway we're trying to build VSTa under Linux right now and it runs
>fairly smooth, except for linking. Has anyone had any success?
>The closed we got so far is 'ld -nostdlib -Tdata 40000 -Ttext 1020 -N'
>and a handcrafted perl script to bring things together, but
>it also fails to run. (We use the standalone package and only tries
>to build standsh.)

More details on what "fails to run" could help. It sounds like you're trying
to place things at the right locations. The a.out header MUST be present
at 0x1000, BTW. VSTa reads it because djgpp did not assign reliable values
to, ummm, I think it was "etext". From memory, I think it was set to the
first byte beyond the end of text in 1.X, and to the start of data in 2.X.
So you couldn't reliably tell how big your text was (which VSTa needs to
know, when it sets up his kernel mappings), so I figured why not put the
a.out header down where it lives anyway, and just get the text size from
there?

>% cd /bin
>% run ./date

Try "path /bin", then "run date". standsh doesn't use the "true" execvp(),
so even "./program" might not work. Since ls works, I'm assuming you have
things mounted in their correct places already.

>% set PATH /bin

standsh doesn't use the environment server, which is what "set" talks to.
If you had started an "rc", he would've inherited this, though.

>What can be wrong?

standsh is what's wrong! :-( I actually considered throwing it out, but
it's still useful when things get very, very sick. Its built-in path command
will probably get things working for you.

                                                Andy
Received on Fri Dec 17 11:03:09 1993