↳ In-reply-to » Alright, I have a little 8086 assembler for my toy OS going now – or rather a proof-of-concept thereof. It only supports a tiny fraction of the instruction set. It was an interesting learning experience, but I don’t think trying to “complete” this program is worth my time.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, what else does one need? 😅

I added more instructions, made it portable (so it runs on my own OS as well as Linux/DOS/whatever), and the assembler is now good enough to be used in the build process to compile the bootloader:

Image

That is pretty cool. 😎

It’s still a “naive” assembler. There are zero optimizations and it can’t do macros (so I had to resort to using cpp). Since nothing is optimized, it uses longer opcodes than NASM and that makes the bootloader 11 bytes too large. 🥴 I avoided that for now by removing some cosmetic output from the bootloader.