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First post, by digger

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John W. Ratcliff has open-sourced most of the DIGPAK drivers under the MIT License.

The sources can be found here: https://github.com/jratcliff63367/oldsource

He actually pushed this source code to GitHub back in February, but a few days ago, he clarified the license terms under which he was releasing this code.

Also, some missing include and make files were added recently.

This code can be interesting to play with, or perhaps even to use as a basis for developing drivers for more modern audio hardware. 🙂

Would anybody care to help me "port" these assembly sources from TASM Ideal mode dialect to something that allows them to be built with an open source assembler? 😇

Reply 1 of 4, by twiz11

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digger wrote on 2021-09-23, 22:13:
John W. Ratcliff has open-sourced most of the DIGPAK drivers under the MIT License. […]
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John W. Ratcliff has open-sourced most of the DIGPAK drivers under the MIT License.

The sources can be found here: https://github.com/jratcliff63367/oldsource

He actually pushed this source code to GitHub back in February, but a few days ago, he clarified the license terms under which he was releasing this code.

Also, some missing include and make files were added recently.

This code can be interesting to play with, or perhaps even to use as a basis for developing drivers for more modern audio hardware. 🙂

Would anybody care to help me "port" these assembly sources from TASM Ideal mode dialect to something that allows them to be built with an open source assembler? 😇

at least he released it under mit and not under gpl as it would have been a hassle to replicate a sound card from that period

I am I

Reply 2 of 4, by carlostex

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digger wrote on 2021-09-23, 22:13:

Would anybody care to help me "port" these assembly sources from TASM Ideal mode dialect to something that allows them to be built with an open source assembler? 😇

Why do you need to port it? You can use GUI Turbo Assembler.

Reply 3 of 4, by digger

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carlostex wrote on 2021-09-30, 08:48:

Why do you need to port it? You can use GUI Turbo Assembler.

I know this is a bit of a philosophical matter, but I believe that open source code isn't truly Free until you are able to build it with a completely open source toolchain.

Additionally to that, for me personally there is also the practical aspect of wanting to code and cross-assemble such project from within a Linux environment, and having to spin up a VM or an emulator just to build the code makes things a bit more complicated.

Of course, considering the many projects out there that have been written in TASM Ideal mode dialect, the ideal solution (no pun intended) would be an open source assembler that had a high level compatibility with TASM Ideal mode, but as far as I know, none of the ones out there come even close to that.

The maintainer of the Open Watcom v2 toolchain has been quite helpful in his attempts to improve TASM Ideal mode compatibility in WASM, but still it isn't close to working with the code bases I have tried with it so far, notably the DIGPAK and VSB sources.

I've gained some experience from my porting attempts so far (particularly w.r.t. the VSB code), but haven't been able to produce a functional port of any of these projects yet.