Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 15:27:20 +0300 (EET DST) From: Esa A E Peuha Reply-To: Esa DOT Peuha AT Helsinki DOT FI To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com Subject: 32-bit DPMI host Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Precedence: bulk After some consideration, I've decided to do what I can to turn CWSDPMI into a 32-bit program. I won't be able to do that all by myself, but it's better than nothing :-) I think it would be best to load the 32-bit CWSDPMI just like any other djgpp-compiled program. Of course, that will require a stub that can load and execute a COFF image even in the absence of a DPMI host, and possibly check to see that this image doesn't rely on DPMI either, if that's easy to do. Since this stub must detect the kind of environment (DPMI, VCPI, XMS, or none), it should also pass this information to the image it starts. Likewise, we need a replacement for crt0.s that will work without DPMI. In addition to the usual functions, this should provide a function to terminate-and-stay-resident, because CWSDPMI will mostly exit through this. Perhaps a replacement for `__dpmi_int' should also go there, and general mode-switching functions, if they are needed anywhere. The startup code should check whether the stub provides the environment information, and if not, just assume DPMI services are available. I won't be able to write these pieces of code, because I don't know the necessary details. But if some one else does that, I will probably be able to rewrite most of the CWSDPMI code (at least, after asking some questions here). Esa Peuha student of mathematics at the University of Helsinki http://www.helsinki.fi/~peuha/