2024-06-30

The last three weeks included a vacation time for me. I didn't do a lot of work during these two weeks.

An initial revision of the convedr.pl script. This only handles RASM-86 output files correctly so far, combined with WarpLink map files. After the initial commit, support was added for .rel files as created by the new EDR-DOS fixupp. The script is not considered finished yet, as it will also have to handle JWasm listing files to create a complete trace listing file of either DRBIO or DRDOS.

The free software recreation of the fixupp utility has been extended to allow creation of .rel files which can be combined with the RASM-86 listing files to mark relocations in a trace listing file. This will be needed by TracList eventually.

The uses of RASM-86 have also been adjusted to create listing files. The DRBIO uses of JWasm likewise. The RASM-86 output files created using fixupp have been adjusted to also create .rel files listing the relocations in each section of an object file.

The LBA search strings were extracted to lbasuch.asm ("such" means "search" in german). This is to allow including the search strings in a new utility, called doubles.

lbasuch.asm was further adjusted to allow including it twice, by including a prefix define that has to be set before including the file.

The lbasuch.asm file had some additional information added for every search string. In addition, it allows to control whether all strings are included or only a subset. The doubles program includes lbasuch.asm twice, once with not all strings and another time with all strings. This allows doubles to insure that all strings are detected by the reduced set of search strings. To allow the space needed, doubles works with multiple data segments and assembles to an MZ executable. The name doubles is from its other function, which is to display if doubled search strings are found in the reduced set.

Finally, lbasuch.asm had conditions added to exclude certain define combinations if not all search strings are requested. This reduces the amount of strings from 512 to 42 unique strings. The doubles tool insures both that the remaining strings are unique and that they match all possible combinations for search strings. Building instsect now uses only this reduced set of search strings. As a side effect, this reduces the build time of instsect noticeably.

Support the version string returned from int 21h function 33FFh. I added this because I reported to the DOG project that this function may be supported by DOS versions that do not report the OEM code FDh. I listed RxDOS and Enhanced DR-DOS as examples. Now the lDOS fork of MS-DOS also supports this function.

The call to function 3306h now pre-initialises bx to 0. That means if the function isn't supported it will display the version number as 0.00 rather than a random value.

• In makinst.sh allow instsect to find its include file in the same directory as instsect.asm (for lbasuch.asm addition)
• Fix to not eat comma after a length number if no length keyword follows, this caused a test failure (bug in c3ad1ea23cd1 on 2024-04-05, that is after release 8)
• Optimise prior fix
• Include extlib.eld in test environments
• Add several Extension for lDebug tests to the test suite
• Add test reference chapter to the manual, listing every existing test (some fairly detailed)