Future of ELKS

BODRATO Stefano
2004-05-24T13:17:28Z

>This is quite interesting for me, since I've started develope a cross
>platform '8 bit' OS tough not in C but mixed assembly and a 'C subset'
>language, with a layered design (a 'monitor' layer with detect hw, provide
>low level access to the hw, and loads and links the kernel & other drivers
>on booting, and the arch independent kernel which only depends on the CPU
>type, so all Z80 based machines should have run the same kernel but of
>couse different monitor).

erm.. have a look at www.z88dk.org and, please, write us !! :oP
(well, the whole old 8-bit era seems to be well represented here).

Never told about Z88DK for not going off topic, but it could be retargetted to the 8086 family and probably compiled with bcc or Borland.
I also heard that the sdcc staff had the thought to support the 80186 CPU, time ago, but it never happened.
Probably this is because the big number of already existing compilers. I'm not proposing to do THAT job; it wouldn't make sense.

Anyway I don't think that the old 8 bit asm code can be compared EXACTLY to the 16 bit segmented one.
The 8086 code, in my opinion, is almost the 30% bigger than the Z80 one, expecially if we optimize it with relative jumps, 8 bit registers, etc.. ; just compare the opcode tables.