[Vgabios-developers] tools86 - still necessary?

[Peter \"Firefly\" Lund]

I see you pipe the gcc -E output through tools86 to cope with semi-working
versions of as86, the way they do in dosemu.

But they wrote tools86 for that back in '95 or so and as86 has improved a
bit since.

The as86 version supplied with my Debian 2.2 (potato) system seems to be
0.14.9.

If I edit the Makefile to not pipe gcc -E output thru tools86 everything
still compiles fine.

The other thing tools86 is used for is to convert the binary to an a.out
binary... whereupon dd is used to skip the first 32 bytes (is that the
size of the a.out header?  Should be, if there are no symbols)

As far as I can tell, it's just some magic to create a raw binary without
headers.

Wouldn't it be easier to pass -d to ld86 in the first place?

-Peter

"What responsible Government would prefer its citizens pay a large
international tax to a foreign corporation over creating high-tech jobs in
its local economy?"
  -- Andreas Pour