MSA2 x86 assembler for real-mode DOS

 ooo        ooooo  .oooooo..o       .o.         .oooo.
 `88.       .888' d8P'    `Y8      .888.      .dP""Y88b
  888b     d'888  Y88bo.          .8"888.           ]8P'
  8 Y88. .P  888   `"Y8888o.     .8' `888.        .d8P'
  8  `888'   888       `"Y88b   .88ooo8888.     .dP'
  8    Y     888  oo     .d8P  .8'     `888.  .oP     .o
 o8o        o888o 8""88888P'  o88o     o8888o 8888888888

MSA2 is a old and free x86 two-pass assembler for DOS targets. It supports all Intel 8086 instructions and most of the 80186/80286 instructions.

Initialy written by a 14-year old Swedish programmer Robert Ostling (in 2000-2001) in Borland C++ 2.0. Now, MSA2 is ported to Watcom C and GCC (and/or mingw).

MSA2 Consume to small piece of memory - i think, will be enougth just 128K. MSA2 does not require DPMI.

MSA2 is pretty fast and the only file you'll need to build a program is MSA2.EXE (50 KB). It runs fine on my old 286.

MSA2 - has precompiled binary for DOS and win32. You can compile DOS programs in modern windows without DosBox.

I had not test MSA2 in FreeDOS, Linux, windows yet, but there should not be any difference where running MSA2.

To compile your source with MSA2 just type:

MSA2 coolprog.asm -o coolprog.com

Output formats

MSA2 produces next formats:

• -f bin flat binary output
• -f com .com file
• -f texe .exe file with tiny memory model
• -f ovl .ovl overlay file with tiny memory model (this is the same as texe, but with symbol table).

Examples how to use overlays - see /original/examples/OVL-TP7/ folder.

Differences with MSA

• Added missed opcodes
• Added .exe generation

Differences with NASM

• No macros / includes
• No conditional jumps optimization (near/short)

Build MSA2

MSA2 could be compiled for DOS, Linux and windows with Open Watcom C, GCC, GCC/MINGW.

DOS

To build DOS version with Watcom C, just type (in original/src/)

make

or

wmake

Linux

To build Linux version with GCC:

gcc -O3 MSA.C TABLES.C ASSEMBLR.C MISC.C LEX.C -o MSA2
strip MSA2

windows

To build win32 version with mingw:

i686-w64-mingw32-gcc -m32 -O3 MSA.C TABLES.C ASSEMBLR.C MISC.C LEX.C -o MSA2W.EXE
strip MSA2W.EXE

License

This is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the MIT license. See LICENSE file.