Table of Contents
Late mid March work
On words for my work
I recently had an opportunity again to note that I like to call my self an amateur. While relating this I also specified that the word comes from amare, "to love". I just checked this and my anecdote appears to be actually correct.
Early mid March work
2024-03-17
This week I worked a little on lDebug(X) and inicomp. I also prepared another two blogposts, the PM int 21h handler mystery and a yet unreleased post.
Further, I have considered a new repo which will be based on the mak script of lDebug and will provide the scripting needed to wrap and optionally compress the Enhanced DR-DOS single-file kernel or the FreeDOS kernel. This will also eventually lead to CONFIG block support in inicomp and fdkernpl (part of ldosboot).
The Protected Mode int 21h handler mystery
Following the bug report on the forum, I changed the PM int 21h handler of lDebugX to first switch stacks and then transfer control to the code section, as the transfer function as yet requires a 16-bit stack (either ss B bit or esph must be zero).
This involved moving some patch sites into the entry section. This is not a problem any longer as the 386-related patches now store separate tables for the entry section. However, it was a problem before this change which is why the original int 21h entry in the entry section used all manual patches not using the tables.
To test that the entry section patches work, I rebuild lDebugX with _CATCHPMINT214C=0. It required some changes to build. For instance, with _DEBUG=0 the excsave table wasn't included in the build. To avoid using this table I tried to build using _DEVICE=0 _TSR=0. This failed due to a recent change to inicomp involving the lCFG block, which didn't allow building with _IMAGE_EXE=1 _DEVICE=0.
Early March work
2024-03-10
This week I modified inicomp and lDebug, and finished another lDebug release.
