[luau] MASM within Bochs/FreeDOS Emulation

[Warren Togami]

I'm currently taking ICS312 at the University of Hawaii where we are
required to use Microsoft Assembler (MASM) for our coding projects.  I
am wondering if anybody has any experience with MASM, especially
attempting to run it on any DOS running within a virtual machine.  I am
trying to create an easy platform for Linux and Mac students in my class
in order to learn ASM without the need for Windows (grader will only
test our project assignments in MASM).

http://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/bb/viewtopic.php?t=2
I had attempted to run MASM on FreeDOS running on the Bochs Pentium
Emulator in Linux, but it crashed.  You can read about these problems at
this address.

I am not fully understanding about the capabilities of MASM in FreeDOS,
especially within a Bochs environment.  I suspect that Bochs or FreeDOS
cannot support some features that MASM needs, or some of the coding
requirements needed for my class this semester.  I realize this question
is a bit vague, though I would appreciate any insight into these
problems.

Alternatively, would there be any other 99.9%+ MASM compatible assembler
that is free or Linux based?  What problems may I run into with the
other assemblers?

Thanks,
Warren Togami
warren at togami.com
Mid-Pacific Linux Users Group
http://www.mplug.org


p.s.
http://www.mplug.org/archive/2002/bochs_win98_install.php
Here's one cool though unrelated screenshot of Bochs running the Win98
Installer in Linux.  Bochs isn't nearly as fast or stable as VMWare, but
it is free and Open Source, and runs on other platforms like PowerPC.